Theresa May: I thank the Leader of the House for giving us next week's business. I have some serious points to raise about the business next week, but before that there are some issues that I want to raise relating to matters outside the House.
	First, I am sure that hon. Members in all parts of the House are concerned about the latest tragic news from Zimbabwe, so will the Leader of the House make sure that before the Christmas recess the House is informed about steps being taken to resolve the political crisis in Zimbabwe and to ensure that those innocent people are given the help that they desperately need?
	Yesterday the Prime Minister announced a new scheme to help home owners who have lost their jobs and are fearful of losing their homes too. Before we debate housing next week, will the Housing Minister make a statement on the details of the scheme, setting out how it will work, who it will help and which lenders are signed up to it?
	With only eight sitting days left before Christmas, will the Leader of the House give us a date for the Chancellor's oral statement to the House on Equitable Life?
	I turn to the business for next week. Mr. Speaker, we welcomed your statement yesterday on the search by police of the office of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and seizure of equipment and material from his office, and welcome the decision to set up a Speaker's Committee to look into the matter. I remind the Leader of the House that in his statement yesterday, Mr. Speaker said that the Committee was
	"to report as soon as possible."—[ Official Report, 3 December 2008; Vol. 485, c. 3.]
	The details were to be set out in a Government motion.
	Today we have that Government motion. It bears no resemblance to the statement by Mr. Speaker and no resemblance to what the House understood would be an immediate and speedy inquiry into the police action. Far from an immediate inquiry, the motion says that the Committee will immediately adjourn and will not meet not just until after the police inquiry is finished, but until any criminal proceedings are finished. In other words, it might not meet for months. And the Committee is to reflect the balance of the House. In other words, it will be dominated by the Government. Does the Leader of the House not accept that it is in the Government's own interests to ensure that there can be no suggestion that there is interference in the work of the Committee by the Government?
	I am sure the Leader of the House, like the Prime Minister yesterday, will hide behind the need not to affect the police investigation, but does she not accept that there are different issues at stake? The police investigation is into the leak of information from the Home Office. The Speaker's Committee will consider the seizure by police of material from the office of a Member of the House and police interference with the ability of a Member of the House to do their job. At heart lies the relationship between a Member and their constituents, who rely on the confidentiality of any information that they give us or material that they share with us.
	The matter raises issues of concern across the whole House but, typically, the Government are curtailing debate to three hours, including debate on the business motion. We should have a full day's debate on this matter. Of course, we should not lose a day's Queen's Speech debate on education, skills and housing, so will the Leader of the House change the business and give us a full day's debate on the Speaker's Committee motion, another full day's debate on education, skills and housing and let the Queen's Speech debate go on a day longer?
	Yesterday, Mr. Speaker made it clear that in future a warrant will always be required when a search of a Member's office or parliamentary papers is carried out. The Prime Minister refused to agree with that. Does the Leader of the House agree with that new procedure? Yesterday, the Prime Minister refused to say that he regretted that a Member's office was searched without a warrant. Last night on television, the Leader of the House also refused to do so. Will she now tell the House that she does regret the fact that a Member's office was searched without a warrant?
	In relation to the confidentiality of constituents' business, can the Leader of the House confirm that to access to the electronic files and e-mails of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford, the police would have gone into the parliamentary server and on to the shared drive, and will therefore have been able to access all hon. Members' e-mails and files? Can the Leader of the House give an assurance that no other hon. Member's files or e-mails were accessed by the police?
	Finally, the Home Secretary is making a statement on this matter this morning. However, the Home Office reportedly passed responsibility for the leak investigation to the Cabinet Office. When will the Minister for the Cabinet Office come to the House to make a statement setting out what he knew about the matter and his involvement in it? At the heart of this issue lies the ability of Members of this House to do their job and represent their constituents. It is the job of the Leader of the House to protect the interests of this House. The motion for Monday's business manifestly fails to do so; the Leader of the House now needs to think again.

Harriet Harman: There are four principles that, as Leader of the House, I strongly support. The first is that Members should be able to get on with their job as Members of Parliament, the job to which they have been elected, and that the Opposition must be able to get on with their job of holding the Government to account—that is a job not just for Opposition Members, but for Government Back Benchers as well.
	The second principle is that Members are not above the law, and the third principle is that we should support the operational independence of the police. It is very important for hon. Members to bear that in mind at all times—including later today and on Monday.
	I add a fourth principle that I hope that the House would support—the impartiality and the professionalism of civil servants and the civil service and the upholding of the civil service code. I will not respond to the right hon. Lady's invitation to comment on the police investigation—that would, in my view, invite me to interfere with the police carrying on their job in respect of a current investigation.
	The security of hon. Members' e-mails is a security matter and therefore a matter for the House authorities.

Simon Hughes: I thank the Leader of the House for her statement. I also thank her for the fact that we know that we will have a statement by the Home Secretary today and the debate on Monday. I appreciate that outside the House people are concerned about their homes, jobs and finances, but these matters are to do with the House and its business. I will work on them with my colleagues in the Conservative party and in other parties, and Labour Back Benchers, to ensure that the rights and privileges that we have on behalf of our constituents are upheld. I ask these questions, or make these comments, in that context.
	First, let me say to the Leader of the House that your statement yesterday, Mr. Speaker, was helpful but made it absolutely clear that somewhere among the authorities of this House and/or the police there was a fundamental failure to protect the rights and interests of our constituents. We have great respect for you, Mr. Speaker, for the Serjeant at Arms, for the Leader of the House and for the police—both for the offices and the persons—but there can be no escaping the fact that we must have accountability for the failures that meant that police came into this building without a warrant. That is unacceptable, and I hope that the Leader of the House accepts that. Although she appears, understandably, to be separate from this issue, she has the same duty as we do in making sure that the rights and liberties of all Members of Parliament are upheld, and that if Officers of the House, however eminent, do not do that, they are held to account. I cannot say otherwise, because it is really important that we do that.
	Let me also say that the police, whom we respect, have a duty to be respectful of the job that we do on behalf of our constituents, and if they have made mistakes, then they, too, must be held to account, because they are not above the law either, nor are they above understanding the constitutional position that they have in relation to this place.
	Secondly, I will not stand up here and support civil servants acting improperly—I share the Leader of the House's view about that—but the Government have failed to bring a civil service Bill before Parliament, although they have had opportunities to do so since 2004, when we had a draft Bill. May we have an assurance that in this Session we will have a civil service Bill so that we can legislate to put the rights and responsibilities of civil servants on to a statutory footing, for which we have argued for a very long time?
	The Leader of the House announced that the week after next we will have a debate on the prayer that my hon. Friends and I have tabled on the VAT increase. It is nonsense that the Chancellor can come to Parliament and make a pre-Budget statement that is actually a Budget and that has immediate effect the following week—on 1 December, when the tax changes were implemented—yet Parliament has no say in that decision. Last year, the Prime Minister said at the launch of his leadership campaign:
	"I want to build a shared national consensus for a programme of constitutional reform that strengthens the accountability of all who hold power".
	I put it to the Leader of the House that he is not succeeding if he brings measures to Parliament whereby Parliament has no right to vote on money spent and money raised.
	Unless this Parliament can take some of its powers back and manage the spending and raising of money, we are in trouble, and we are not doing our job.
	Lastly, I put this point to the Leader of the House throughout the whole of the last Session, and she was sympathetic in words but not yet in action. We have a relatively short legislative programme. During the last Session, week after week, there was no time for amendments or new clauses tabled by her colleagues or those in other parties to be debated. Will she today give an undertaking that all legislation this year will be properly debated and that there will be a new procedure, like that of many Parliaments, through which a business committee is established so that Parliament can decide its business, not the Government? We need less power with the Executive and more power with Parliament and the people, and unless she can deliver that, she and her colleagues will fail the country badly.

Harriet Harman: I take it that the hon. Gentleman was saying that we should have cross-party support for the four principles that I have set out as Leader of the House—the principles of MPs being able to get on with their job, the police being operationally independent, the impartiality of the civil service and MPs not being above the law. We should not pick or choose one or the other of those four principles for our convenience. It is incumbent on this House to support all those principles and make sure that we get the balance right. I know that the hon. Gentleman understands and reflects deeply on constitutional issues, and he will recognise that we need a cross-party, whole-House approach to the question of the four principles, not a party political divide.
	The hon. Gentleman mentioned the civil service code, which we support, and we also introduced the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 to ensure that those civil servants who felt that it was on their conscience to disclose information in the public interest. We introduced that Act in order that there should be provision for civil servants to give out information that they felt was in the public interest.
	The hon. Gentleman talked about all legislation being properly debated. It is my concern to ensure that Bills are in as good an order as possible before they are introduced to the House, so that amendments can only be those introduced as a result of debate in the House. I share the view of the House, and support it in its concern, that policy should be established clearly in advance so that a Bill is brought to the House in as complete a form as possible. We always have to introduce amendments if they have been tabled in another place or by Back Benchers from across the House, but I agree that it is my responsibility to ensure that all legislation is properly debated.

Barry Sheerman: Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree, like myself and most Members of this House, about the importance of the independence of Members of Parliament and the way in which they should be allowed to carry on with their work? But many of our constituents will not forgive us if we get this matter out of proportion. We are in the midst of a global economic meltdown, and my constituents would be very displeased if we were distracted from the main purpose of this House, which is making sure that the people of this country survive and thrive in this global economic turmoil.

Harriet Harman: We have many occasions to debate the economy and it is right that we should do so. As for the motion, it will be debatable on the proceedings on a motion to establish the Speaker's committee. That will be a business of the House matter that will be debated and voted on by hon. Members on Monday.

Harriet Harman: Those matters might well be debated and considered alongside the marine and coastal access Bill.
	May I take the opportunity to remind Members that the motion on the Speaker's Committee clearly says:
	"That the Committee consist of seven members appointed by the Speaker".

Harriet Harman: Obviously, if any child care services are being provided in madrassas, they are subject to inspection and registration. If my hon. Friend is identifying the fact that such provision is being made, in effect, in madrassas but is not coming within the inspection regime, I will invite my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families to look into that and liaise with her on it. We need to ensure that all children are protected.

Andrew MacKinlay: Can the Leader of the House help to clarify one point that has troubled me overnight.  [Interruption.] No, it is a serious point. A certificate was signed by the Serjeant at Arms waiving the need for a warrant. Surely the only person who could have done that is the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). If somebody wanted to search the flat that I rent, my managing agent could not authorise that. Only I could, surely. Can we have some clarification of whether the only the person who can say, "Yes, you can come into my flat or my office," and authorise that is that person himself or herself? Is that not the case?

Philip Davies: May we have a debate on sentencing? On Saturday 29 November, a judge sent somebody for prison for six weeks for theft, yet, unbelievably and directly as a result of the early release scheme, the same offender came before the same judge three days later, on Tuesday 2 December, and was again charged with theft. Is it not a scandal that somebody can be sent to prison for six weeks by a judge and be out of prison within a few days, because of the early release scheme, free to commit the same offence? Should not the criminal justice system be focusing on sorting out this kind of scandal, rather than on a Member of Parliament going about his legitimate business?

Jacqui Smith: Sir Paul informed me of his intention to set up a review of the handling of the case to date, which I welcomed. The following day he announced that Chief Constable Ian Johnston would conduct that review. In that telephone call with Sir Paul I expressed my support for the operational independence of the police from political intervention——as I have done previously, as I have done since, and as I will continue to do.
	Nobody in the House should doubt the sensitivity of the investigation or the importance of the issues involved. I welcome your statement yesterday, Mr. Speaker, and your decision to set up a Committee of seven Members of this House. Your statement also set out the circumstances in which the police asked for and gained consent to search the parliamentary office of the hon. Member for Ashford. I spoke to Sir Paul Stephenson yesterday evening to seek his clarification of those events. Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick has subsequently written to me to set out his understanding of the obligations the Met were under and his account of the steps they took. I am placing a copy of that letter in the Library. Sir Paul also assured me that Ian Johnston's review will cover those issues.
	I wholeheartedly support the right of every hon. Member to do their job, to hold the Government to account, and to make available information that is in the public interest, but the systematic leaking of government information raises issues that strike at the heart of our system of governance. Such activity is not about merely creating political embarrassment, for me or for any other Minister. Such activity threatens the respected role of the civil service in supporting our democracy in a politically impartial, honest and professional manner, and it drives a coach and horses through the civil service code, which states that civil servants should act
	"in a way which deserves and retains the confidence of Ministers, while at the same time ensuring that you will be able to establish the same relationship with those whom you may be required to serve in some future government."
	All of us, on both sides of the House, have a right to expect that our vital role should be protected, and we have a responsibility, too, to respect the law and uphold the proper workings of the civil service. I would be surprised—and indeed dismayed—if any hon. Member thought that that was not the case.
	I commend my statement to the House.

Dominic Grieve: There is not the slightest evidence of that and Her Majesty's Opposition take the integrity of official secrets as seriously as the Government, despite attempts by Government spokesmen to smear and spin to the contrary.
	The Home Secretary has regularly briefed me and my predecessor on matters of national security. Can she name one occasion when she has raised any concern that her confidence has not been kept? Can she now confirm that no known leaks from her Department relating to national security involve my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green)?
	This episode has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political embarrassment. Nor is it about confidentiality in the work place, matters for which employment law provides a perfectly adequate remedy. If there have been 20 leaks or more, as the Government are briefing, the problem extends well beyond any facts relevant to my hon. Friend. It heralds a systematic breakdown in trust between officials and Ministers, arising from the Home Secretary's willingness to conceal failings in her own Department on matters of manifest public interest.
	The Home Office initiated the leak inquiry and knew that Opposition Members had commented on four disclosures reported in the media. Is it the case that for eight days after the arrest of Mr. Galley, the police were investigating my hon. Friend, but the Home Secretary had not the faintest idea about it? If she was cut out of the loop, was the Minister for the Cabinet Office or any other Minister or official there informed by the police that a Member of Parliament was the target of their investigation? If the Cabinet Office was kept updated, why was not the Home Secretary? Why was the Cabinet Office not kept updated if it had initiated the investigation? Were counter-terrorism police operating without any Home Office ministerial notification, oversight or accountability from start to finish?
	The Home Secretary has stated— [ Interruption. ]

John Reid: On the basis of the statement by the Home Secretary, I have no doubt at all about her integrity and truthfulness in this matter. It ill behoves Opposition Members to imply that there is a lack of either. I also accept the integrity and impartiality of the vast majority of civil servants who day in, day out serve Governments of all persuasions, despite their own personal opinions. That should be placed on the record. However, I would be wrong if I did not express some unease about two aspects of the matter. One is fact that having been told—quite properly, in my view—that there was contact on this subject between one politician connected with the Metropolitan police service, the Mayor of London, and the person at the centre of the investigation, that must be looked at. Secondly, I am surprised, to say the least, that the Secretary of State for the Home Department was not informed that her opposite number, effectively, was about to be arrested. If I had been told after the event that that had been done, I cannot think that I would have remained as placid as she has in the circumstances. Notwithstanding the fact that she has said that even if she had been informed, she would not have acted differently, I do not think that we should take that as a ruling that someone in her position should never be informed. For my part, I would have wanted to be informed, and to express a view on the matter. I hope that she will look at those processes without prejudice.

Jacqui Smith: It is, of course, completely appropriate that the process of both the investigation and the information that was passed on should be part of questions and consideration after the police investigation. With respect to my right hon. Friend's first point, I believe the Metropolitan Police Authority and certain Members have already questioned what the Mayor knew, who he chose to share that information with and who he chose to communicate it to. It seems wholly appropriate for them to do that. On the second point, about whether and when I should have been informed, it is a matter for the Metropolitan police as to the point at which I was informed. I have made clear the questions that I asked after being informed. On the subject of placidity—I think that sometimes it behoves Home Secretaries to deal calmly with issues that are of significance, such as the present matter.

Jacqui Smith: Once again, I have to say that a Member is claiming a greater knowledge of the evidence than he can possibly have. When there has been systematic leaking and internal leak inquiries have not been able to discover its source, at a certain point I do believe it appropriate to ask the police for their assistance in that investigation.

John Redwood: Can the Home Secretary explain what was unique about this case that led to them to want the police to be involved, when the police were not invited to investigate the systematic leaking of price-sensitive information about banks and bank capital, or to look into the extraordinary leaking of practically the whole pre-Budget statement, which was really a Budget? Surely that was systematic leaking on a grand scale. What was different about it?

Theresa May: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. With regard to the Speaker's Committee on the search of offices on the parliamentary estate, could you clarify the situation and perhaps give the Leader of the House an opportunity to retract her suggestion about who is able to choose the members of that Committee? Yesterday, in your statement, you said clearly that you would be setting up
	"a Committee of seven senior and experienced Members, nominated by me".—[ Official Report, 3 December 2008; Vol. 485, c. 3.]
	In business questions earlier, the Leader of the House said also that she believed that you would be nominating that Committee, but the motion on Monday says that the seven Members appointed by the Speaker will be
	"reflecting the composition of the House".
	In other words, you and you alone will not be able to choose the Members. Our understanding is that the membership would be selected by you and you alone.

Business Rate Supplements Bill

Simon Hughes: In earlier debates, the Home Secretary said that she is keen for the police to build on their good community work by being responsive at all times to people who ask them for assistance. Will she report back on whether she has been able to take action to ensure that that happens? Not hearing back from the police causes a genuine problem with public confidence. Have she or her colleagues in other Departments considered whether, in supplementing the police in communities, more money and support could be provided for detached youth workers to assist with the problems that she experiences in her constituency, as I do in mine, so that those who are on young people's side work with them, rather than those who are sometimes perceived to be against them?

Mark Field: It is fairly fruitless to bandy statistics about, as we have tried to impress upon the Home Secretary, although I entirely endorse what she says about neighbourhood policing. The scheme in my constituency, which works with the local authority, has been something of a success. She referred earlier to accountability. Given her passion for accountability, and no doubt for giving more power to a much more galvanised local electorate, what does she believe the way forward is for directly elected police commissioners, for example? Is this going to be part and parcel of the Bill that she is bringing forward, and what are her general thoughts on this matter?

Jacqui Smith: No I do not, and I have made it clear that I think that there should be an abolition of the police authority and a single directly elected police commissioner. That is what I have made clear previously and I still hold to that position.

Jacqui Smith: Yes, I am satisfied with the current arrangements for the appointment of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
	All the measures that I have outlined are designed to build public confidence in the fight against crime and are matched by concrete achievements in freeing up the police to ensure that they can focus on the issues that matter to people. We are removing all but one target set from Whitehall, in order to deliver improved levels of public confidence, scrapping the stop-and-account form and streamlining the process of crime recording for police forces. We are providing the police with the tools that they need to do their job, with 10,000 handheld devices in the past year and 20,000 more to come over the next 18 months.

Jacqui Smith: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice is advising me on the price of beer, which I have to confess to not being an expert on myself. I am not going enter into future decisions about tax levels, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not expect me to.
	Strong and safe communities need local people to be given a fair say in the rules that we all live by. My hon. Friends the Members for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods), for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) and for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter) have argued that case very strongly with respect to lap-dancing clubs. We will tighten the controls on lap-dancing clubs, giving local people a greater say in whether those clubs should be allowed to operate in their neighbourhood.

Jacqui Smith: I am just coming on to explain what is in the Bill and I hope that the hon. Gentleman will see that it is very far from tinkering; it is, in fact, a means of bringing about and making stick the largest reform in immigration—both at the border and in country—for many years. The border, immigration and citizenship Bill will give UK Border Agency officers the integrated immigration and customs powers that they need to deliver even greater protections at our borders. It is right that we have tough systems in place to ensure that people who come here have a right to do so and it is right to have tough but fair rules in place to make sure that only those with the skills we need can come here to work or study.
	Last week, tiers 2 and 5 of the points-based system were introduced, allowing us to control immigration by raising and lowering the bar depending on the needs of the economy and the country as a whole. Last week, too, we issued the first ID cards for foreign nationals—opposed by Opposition Members—to protect against identity fraud and illegal working, as well as to make it easier for people to prove that they are who they say they are.
	The Bill also sets out plans for major changes to what we expect of migrants before they can earn British citizenship. British citizenship, Mr. Deputy Speaker, is a privilege. There will no longer be an automatic right to stay here after five years. From now on, newcomers will have to speak English, work hard and play by the rules if they want to stay and build a new life in Britain. And just as the Bill introduces those new responsibilities, we will also create a new duty for the UK Border Agency to take into account the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in its operations.

Dominic Grieve: I note what the Secretary of State says, but I stand by my comments, particularly in respect of violent crime. I must now make progress.
	When it comes to defending our security, the Government have consistently opted for rhetoric over action and headlines over effectiveness. We have had, and we continue to face, proposals to extend detention without charge to 42 days, despite their being roundly rubbished as unjustified, unnecessary and unworkable by security experts and Members across the House and the other place. It still persists, however, as a sort of fig leaf for the Government's previous climbdown, which was forced on them because they entirely lost the arguments over the issue. The Home Secretary is introducing ID cards—at a cost that we believe, on an independent assessment, could rise as high as £19 billion at the worst of economic times—that will be incapable of stopping terrorists, illegal immigration or benefit fraud.
	We are developing a database state and hoarding an increasing volume of data on our citizens, but the Prime Minister readily admits that he cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe, which, on the current record of the last year, is a gross understatement. There are real fears that Britain is turning into a surveillance society, with local councils stretching powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to monitor dustbins and dog fouling and to trail children home from school to check their catchment areas.
	The thirst for headlines and the inflation of ineffective bureaucracy and legislative hyperactivity distract the Government and successive Home Secretaries from the real job at hand: getting more police on the street with the single imperative of cutting crime, and a dedicated border police force to reverse our current vulnerability, which has seen the street value of cocaine and heroin slashed by almost half, while estimates show that the numbers of young women and girls trafficked into prostitution have quadrupled.
	I should say at this point that I entirely welcome the fact that the Government have signed the Council of Europe protocol on human trafficking. I am also delighted that they moved on this matter after we indicated to them very firmly that they should and that they would have our full support when they did so. I am slightly distressed by the fact that it has still taken quite a long time between that assurance being given to the Government and the piece of paper actually being signed.
	We also believe that we need practical measures such as lifting the ban on using intercept evidence in court to prosecute terrorists to protect lives while protecting our way of life and preserving our liberty and our shared democracy. I am afraid that the consequences of the failures of the Government are plain at present. The Government are in fact very short of ideas, as is quite clear from a reading of the relevant sections of the Queen's Speech. They are scrambling to find answers to problems that are of their making and papering over cracks from 11 years of failure.
	The proposals presented by the Home Secretary in the policing and crime Bill are particularly disappointing given the serious problems that Britain now faces. I know that Home Office officials do not always feel it necessary to keep the Home Secretary updated on what is going on, as we have discovered today, but does she accept the advice of Sir David Normington? I put this to her rather than to the Secretary of State for Justice. She claims that violence has dropped by 40 per cent. since 1997, which is contrary to Sir David's statement that recorded crime statistics indicate that levels of the most serious violence are higher than they were 10 years ago. I hope that we can get a response later from the Secretary of State for Justice on that. Is Sir David wrong? He and the Home Secretary cannot both be right.
	The Flanagan report on police bureaucracy set out a whole series of ministerial failures: perverse incentives given to the police in the way in which they handle crime reporting; a raft of targets; and officers straitjacketed by process—the entire product of Labour's effort over the last 11 years to use the criminal justice legislation to achieve those targets. The consequences for the police have been dire, as the Home Secretary is now being obliged gradually to admit.
	The Home Secretary has not listened, which is why the police, despite all her promises, spend more time filling in forms than out on patrol. She has become obsessed by making political noise and neglecting to take sound advice. As a result, a glaring omission from the policing and crime Bill is serious and concerted action to deliver on all those bold pledges to release officers from the burden of forms, targets and red tape.
	It is left to the Conservatives to provide a serious alternative for police reform: cutting the stop and account and stop and search forms; removing the bureaucratic hoops to allow police officers to charge in less serious cases; saving 1 million police hours per year; slashing the targets, which as Sir David Normington noted, have distracted officers from dealing with the most serious crime; and consolidating the excess audit that led one police force to face 15 separate inspections in a year.
	The only substantive proposal for police reform in this rag-bag of measures is the proposal for elected crime and policing representatives to sit on existing police authorities. That looks to me a half-baked idea—a pale imitation of our proposal for elected police commissioners who would be responsible for local policing, directly accountable to the communities they serve and taking over the functions of police authorities. As I speak to senior police officers, it becomes apparent that there are serious concerns that the elected representatives are far more likely to lead to politicisation— [ Interruption. ]

Christopher Huhne: The Justice Secretary accuses me of making a trivial point, but I just wish he knew the difficulties we had in getting Departments even to list the new criminal offences that they have created. If he can assure me that when we follow up those questions by asking those Departments for a full list of every new criminal offence, he will instruct his colleagues not to rule our request out of order on the grounds that it involves disproportionate cost, I will be delighted to give him a full list. If the Government can be less obstructionist in how they answer parliamentary questions, perhaps Opposition parties will be able to do that. He knows perfectly well that I have given him very good clear examples of absolutely absurd offences that have been put on the statute book, and he has done nothing to repeal them. I can give him chapter and verse and can continue through this list. Frankly, it is not good enough for the Justice Secretary to ask the Opposition to do something that he, in government, ought to be able to do.
	I very much welcome what the Home Secretary said, particularly about how the provisions in the draft legislation on identity checks, which it would seem have been misinterpreted, will be implemented. The key issue has always been the potential for extending legislation beyond its original intention when it is put into practice. We have seen that happen time and again, for example, in the application of counter-terrorism legislation to stifle the heckling of the Justice Secretary—as he now is—at a Labour party conference: Walter Wolfgang, a Labour activist, was arrested under counter-terrorism legislation. We must be very careful to ensure that legislation is not extended in this way.
	I very much welcome what the Home Secretary said about the ratification of the protocol on human trafficking. Ratification is well overdue and I am delighted that it is to go ahead. One of the key issues for the Home Office must be implementing the legislation already on the statute book, given that most serious offences have been on the statute book or in common law for many decades, rather than indulging in this extraordinary exercise that we have every year of introducing yet another criminal justice Bill and yet another immigration Bill as a substitute for doing something about implementing the law that we have.
	There is much to support on the police Bill, precisely because it represents a massive U-turn on the central targets that have been a key feature of the Home Office's attitude towards the police since 1997. The Green Paper, the consultation and the response are now saying exactly the right sort of things about local accountability and cutting red tape, but, of course, substantial differences remain between the parties on how that accountability should come about. I listened with interest to what the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) said about the Conservatives' proposals, but I am not persuaded that their proposals for a single elected sheriff for a police force would avoid the problems of populist posturing, Robocop-style campaigning and confrontational politics that he says it will. The differences in this respect between the Government's proposals and the Conservatives' proposals are minimal, and bring to mind Dr. Johnson's quote that he would not debate
	"the point of precedency between a louse and a flea."

Christopher Huhne: I am grateful for that clarification, but it does not reassure me in one key respect. The single elected commissioner, or the multiple mini commissioners proposed by the Home Office, would be elected by the first-past-the-post system. That would be the first time that any new body had been elected under that system since 1997. We know from peer-reviewed academic literature that if elections are carried out under first past the post, the resulting body is substantially less representative in terms of both gender and ethnic minority than is the case with other electoral systems— [ Interruption. ] Well, the Justice Secretary uses unparliamentary language to say what he thinks of that particular point, but I would be happy to send him the references for the literature I mentioned.
	If we were to go ahead with the Government's model for elected police authorities, there would be the most extraordinary results. I have asked the Electoral Reform Society to analyse the likely results of electing one person for each crime and disorder reduction partnership. On the basis of the 2007 election results, the Government—I am told they are a Labour Government—are proposing a system under which the Conservatives would win 65.2 per cent. of all the police authority seats in England outside London, despite polling only 38 per cent. of the vote.

Christopher Huhne: The Justice Secretary deliberately confuses two things that I said. We had at that time serious concerns in ethnic minority communities about the use by the police of stop-and-search powers, which were clearly part of the lead-up to the riots, especially in Brixton. The only point that I am attempting to make—I am surprised that he finds it difficult to grasp—is that problems will arise if the political authority running a police force in an area with a substantial ethnic minority population is not sensitive to the sorts of issues that created major problems with public disorder in the early 1980s, including the insensitive exercising of police powers. The Government should take that point into account when they put forward their proposals, because in their present form they would mean the under-representation of ethnic minorities and women, leading to the consequences that I have outlined. I hope that the Government will have reconsidered their position by the time they actually introduce the legislation.

Christopher Huhne: I have absolutely no suggestion that we should rig any system. I take a democratic view: if there is a system—as is the case in London, with the GLA—whereby BNP members are elected, they are elected. They do not get very far when they are elected, and are often revealed for what they are. All the rest of us who abhor their politics can then point out how useless they are. In a democracy, that is the correct way to deal with those people; it is not try to sweep their views under a carpet and pretend they do not exist, but to introduce the best disinfectant of all in the political system—sunlight—to get some transparency and reveal them for the odious characters they are, and beat them.

Christopher Huhne: I am far more worried about the possibility that a populist, who was not necessarily badged under the BNP logo but might be running as an independent or whatever, could secure election in some part of the country under the proposals of hon. Gentleman's Front-Bench colleagues, or could be running a crime and disorder reduction partnership under the Government's proposals. Those seem to be real risks, so if we want to avoid confrontational politics in holding our police forces to account, and if we want to make sure that police authorities are genuinely representative of all the strands of opinion and the different groups and minorities in their force areas, we must look again at what the Government propose, and we must not go the way that the Conservatives suggest.
	There is much to be welcomed in the proposals for crime mapping. As I said, I welcome extra transparency, and if we can reach a situation whereby people, locally, where it really matters, understand what is happening to crime—and, by the way, to clear-up and detection rates in their area, which are not included in the Government's proposals—we can increase reassurance that crime is being adequately dealt with. That is important.
	I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield that there are real doubts in the public mind about the integrity of crime statistics, in part because it is easy to point out contradictions between the recorded crime figures and the British crime survey figures. I have little doubt that the BCS data, for reasons that Conservative Ministers gave when they were last in government, are the best for assessing long-run trends, but I should like the Office for National Statistics not to have a mere tick-box regulatory role but to take direct, hands-on responsibility for the statistics. I can remember the 1980s, when the Conservative Government changed the definition of unemployment almost every other month. By the end of the decade, public faith in the unemployment figures had virtually disappeared, and it was necessary to re-establish public faith by ensuring that the figures were seen to be collated by an entirely independent body removed from those using the data to make political points. I very much hope that there will be broad consensus for the proposals.
	We are very much in favour of many of the measures that the Home Secretary has announced in this place and elsewhere. Many of them were trailed in the press—not, I suspect, a leak but a brief: in government, "we" brief, but "they" leak. There were a number of briefings, which seemed highly orchestrated, about the advantages of ending binge drinking with measures to restrict promotions and super-cut-price deals. Much of that, however, is to use legislation as a press release rather than using existing legislation to increase the number of prosecutions of off-licences for selling to people who are under age.
	That problem is extraordinarily prevalent. One survey suggested that 40 per cent. of establishments selling alcohol are prepared to sell to under-age drinkers, and do so—yet the existing law is poorly applied. There has been an increase in the number of prosecutions relating to the sale of alcohol to under 18-year-olds; in England and Wales, the figure has increased from 105 in 2002 to 854 in 2006—the latest figures available to me. However, in comparison with the scale of the problem—if it really is the case, as the survey suggests, that 40 per cent. of establishments are selling to under-age people—the number of prosecutions is still just scratching at the surface. We need to be much tougher in dealing with this issue.
	The Home Secretary spoke about the immigration Bill. The Liberal Democrats will support the Government's commitment to the integration of ethnic minority communities, which is absolutely crucial and a vital part of ensuring that a proper immigration policy works, but why are the Government cutting funding for non-English speakers? There has been a 39 per cent. plunge in non-English speakers enrolling on English language courses: the number is down from nearly 550,000 to 335,000—the lowest since 2001-02— [ Interruption. ] The Minister for Borders and Immigration suggests that the figures are somehow false, but they come from the Government's answers to our parliamentary questions.

Christopher Huhne: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I hope that the Secretary of State for Justice—or someone else who was listening—can deal with that issue in the wind-ups.
	Before I finish making the point about coroners playing a crucial part in holding to account the abuse of state power, let me say that we welcome and will support many other aspects of the proposals. We do not, however, feel that the police reform proposals go far enough. We have argued—on police pay review, for example—for a complete review of the police contract. For example, an issue that we do not hear about from either Conservative or Labour Members, yet is pertinent in current circumstances is the very restrictive nature of the single point of entry for chief constables.
	Broadly, people should come into the police force from the bottom, and there is an honourable tradition, as in the French army at one stage, of every corporal carrying a field marshal's baton in their knapsack. However, with complex issues such as the prosecution of fraud, for example, where a degree in accountancy and some experience as a forensic accountant might be of considerable use to someone leading an investigation, there must be enough exceptions to bring in people if they have particular expertise. We would like to open up the issues regarding the police contract such as lifetime employment, pay linked to seniority, pensions and the effectiveness of the incapability procedure.
	We must also touch on the subject of prostitution. I am sure that every hon. Member wants to protect women from exploitation, but the sort of proposals that the Government have made for a Finnish system of criminalising clients indirectly has a very poor record of successful prosecutions, and I do not believe that that is the way forward.
	Overall, there will be elements that we welcome and others that we criticise. I hope increasingly that we can find some consensus about what works in criminal justice, rather than finding ourselves locked in populist battles about retribution and vengeance—which the Secretary of State for Justice is quite keen on, as a political theme. Surely, the key issue for any hon. Member who is concerned about cutting crime should be what works. In that context, we are a very long way from taking on board the evidence from the United States—nor do we spend as much as we should on research to find out what works here. If we did, the Government would be much less disposed to be a threat to our civil liberties than they have proved to be since they were first elected in 1997, and the essential conflicts that inevitably exist between the use of state power in going after criminal activity and the defence of our civil liberties would be less acute if we could anchor the criminal justice debate rather more firmly in real evidence of which interventions work, and at what stage.

Mark Field: For what I fear will be the first of many years to come, the Queen's Speech unashamedly focuses first and foremost on economic issues. Long before the nation was firmly awoken from its slumber to the magnitude of our collective debt crisis by the frightening figures contained in the Chancellor's pre-Budget report last week, some of us had repeatedly warned in the House that, instead of building a secure future, we have been borrowing from it. In truth, the state of the public finances has been a national disgrace for some time. Now, already unsustainable debt levels look set to soar for years to come.
	I make few apologies, as the Member for Cities of London and Westminster, for focusing on economic matters, but they will inevitably have an impact on home affairs and justice going forward. Over 11 years of Labour administration, too much Government borrowing has been funding current consumption. Now, in this time of economic crisis, we seem intent on continuing that approach; but as a strategy, it is neither prudent nor sustainable.
	Our nation stands at a crossroads. I fear that by blindly following the Government's path, with the many bits of legislation that have been announced in the Gracious Speech and in the past 24 hours, we are condemning future generations of Britons, including those still to be born, to pick up the bill for current welfare, health care and pensions provision, as well as for all the other expenditure on various Home Office experiments in the past decade or so and in years to come. In that way, we risk our nation's permanent demotion from being a global economic player as the financial crisis allows commercial and financial power to move firmly eastwards, particularly to the emerging economic superpowers of India and China.
	Far from encouraging the unchecked growth of the state in these times of trouble, for the electorate, we must tell it as it is: the apparently limitless era of cheap and easy money is firmly behind us. An increase in state intervention, as we have seen in recent weeks, may soften the financial blow in the immediate term, but the looming level of interest payments alone on our rising debt risks lowering living standards for decades to come. That will have quite an impact on a range of social issues and social divisions within our society.
	Last week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer confirmed what many of us have long suspected: this year's overspend will far exceed the £43 billion that was predicted as recently as the March Budget, and will rise to £78 billion. It will then reach a colossal £118 billion in 2009-10, always assuming that the Government can, for the first time this century, not overshoot their projected public sector deficit. By 2012-13, the nation will be battling with a net debt that will account for 57 per cent. of gross domestic product, with £350 million being spent in excess of tax receipts every day of the year. That prediction is based on the Government's own figures, which have been shown to be selective and perhaps hopelessly optimistic in the past. It takes no account of expenditure on Network Rail, the cost of bailing out Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley, Halifax Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland, or of the off-balance sheet financing of public infrastructure projects.
	The figures are now so unfeasibly vast that I fear the general public remain blissfully unaware of the seismic implications of the unprecedented level of Government debt that is now locked into the system. The recent banking bail-out, following the credit crisis, has provided the Government with an alibi for the exorbitant levels of public debt, which were already spiralling dangerously out of control. We must ring-fence the billions accrued for the bail-out and the Government's recently announced £20 billion fiscal stimulus plan from the enormous sums that were already on and, indeed, off the public balance sheet.
	If this Queen's Speech is to mark a departure from the past, the new spirit of the age should be for value for money out of the public purse. I fear instead, however, that the idea of big Government as an ever-benevolent cash cow is entrenching even further. The notion that however bad things get financially for the individual, the state will move to soften the blow, has only been increased by the Government's intervention to protect depositors in Northern Rock, Icesave and others, as well as by the Prime Minister's latest announcement, only yesterday, of a two-year benefit, in relation to mortgage payments, to families with children and to pensioners. The Government are returning to their comfort zone, with an economic narrative of interference in the name of protecting the public through continued high spending.
	For sure, no Government can sit idly by; I accept that current events are epoch-changing, and that in decades to come people will look back on these months when they consider economic history and important decisions that have to be made. We should not be immune to the pleadings of those who bear the economic brunt of these hard times. In many ways, those pleadings will become ever stronger in the next year, as we all know, as the apparent economic crisis becomes much more evident to many of our electors. Equally, however, it is important that any action that is taken to soothe our financial troubles is taken responsibly—I might even say prudently—and with a firm eye on our long-term economic future.
	It is imperative that the public are given a reality check. The servicing of the colossal debt that we have already racked up, let alone the somewhat irresponsible spending that is still to come, risks lowering living standards for many years to come. Above all, it will soon dawn on a new generation of younger voters that the unspoken message of the political class, across political parties, to anyone under 30 is that their generation will need not only to fund the cost of pensions for those who are older now, but to lower significantly their own financial expectations when the time comes for them to retire.
	The availability of cheap goods such as clothes, technology and alcohol has created a false sense of material wealth in the young. The longer-term prospect of paying off huge student debts is something that, I am thankful to say, my generation—I am only 20 years out of university—has never had to be concerned about. The rosy future that is envisaged of enjoying a standard of living as good as one's parents, experiencing a decent pension in a retirement that is likely to last for decades and expecting the generous range of state benefits that those in retirement currently take for granted will be unsustainable for the younger generation that is growing up.
	Any failure by the Government rapidly to grasp that nettle risks bringing about serious social unrest in the years ahead. Our society will become economically divided as never before between old and young, as I have pointed out, between those who work in the comparatively secure and well-pensioned public sector and those in the private sector who are reliant on private wealth creation, and between those with globally transferable opportunities and skills, such as Members of the House, and those in an increasingly large tail of low-skilled, chaotic lifestyles.
	I have seen such divides even in my constituency. Labour Members are often sceptical about what life must be like in Westminster, but the community is very polarised. Of course, there are tremendous pockets of wealth in places such as Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Marylebone, but in parts of my constituency, in Pimlico and Bayswater, many people live chaotic lifestyles. They live the sort of lifestyles that probably horrified people when they heard about what happened to baby P only a few miles to the north in Haringey. I, as a Member of Parliament, and my local councillors, can understand that although that sort of thing is not exactly a norm, it is not entirely out of the ordinary. Such events are worrying signs of the polarised society in which we live. That level of polarisation has always been fairly apparent in our capital city, certainly in central London, but I fear that it is becoming even stronger in many other parts of the country, and that it will have profound impacts on the whole issue of justice and the way in which we tackle law and order in the years ahead.
	In addition, we must ensure that the public understand the international implications of our country's continued indebtedness and severely weakened economic clout. We are witnessing the first signs of a seismic and rapid shift of power from the United States and Europe to China, India, Russia and even the Gulf states. The near collapse of the global banking industry is not just an issue of restoring confidence, important though that is, and the Government have tried to take important steps in that direction; it is also about the trust of our electors and of those who use the financial services industry. However, those issues will only accelerate trends that are already in play. The US economy may never recover its dominant position in global markets, and we have to accept that the City of London's position as a leader in the provision of financial and business services will be sorely tested in the years ahead.
	In the midst of all the damage and destruction to the value of the west's financial resources, we face a major loss of economic power and international prestige. Put simply, money is power, and such financial means go hand in hand with global political leadership. The bail-out of US and European banks will be underwritten by the flooding, in the global capital markets, of US and European Government bonds, which will be mopped up by cash-rich sovereign wealth funds, particularly in China, the Gulf and Russia. The power that this money buys will allow them to exert far more political influence, and I believe that in places such as China and Russia, that will be backed up by military force around their borders. I fear that the model of democracy, open societies and free markets supported by the G7 will be sorely put to the test in the years to come.
	In recent months, we have seen that one of the few impediments to Russia exercising military power beyond its borders is the influence of an educated, wealthy and fast-growing domestic middle class. To date, India and China—beyond their problems in Kashmir, Burma and Tibet—have shown relatively little interest in exercising their own military muscle. I believe, however, that as their global financial clout becomes more apparent, so too will their appetite for interference in world affairs. I also fear that some elements of the Islamic world will have regard to the west's ongoing economic crisis. In spite of the Government's projected figures, this crisis will not have gone away by the end of 2009. It is a crisis of economic confidence that will take up the rest of this decade and continue well into the 2020s. We have to ask who in the west will have the financial clout, let alone the political will, to spend money on policing any new flashpoints in the middle east or in parts of Asia.
	I have visited China three times in the past five years, and I have been blown away by the pace of development there. If the US and Europe lose their moral leadership in the management of global financial markets, there is little doubt that, within a decade, the west will be forced to accept China as an economic and political equal.
	I have also visited India twice since 2004. It is a nation under the international spotlight, as the monstrous hand of terrorism visited the great commercial city of Bombay last week. I am pleased that my own police force in the City of London and many other institutions under the Home Office have played a role in assisting India with aspects of terrorism in the past, and I hope that they will give it a great deal of co-operation in the future.
	India has been sadly familiar with terror attacks, but the scale of the assault on Bombay, and the western targets involved, bestow on that city the dubious honour of being considered a global financial centre worthy of such an intricately planned outrage. As appalling as recent events have been, I also believe that they have exposed India for the first time in the eyes of many westerners as a real force to be reckoned with as a country. Bombay's debut as a prominent item on global news bulletins might be viewed in retrospect as the formal recognition of its growing prominence in the international financial system. There is no doubt that that outward-looking, cosmopolitan, dynamic city will bounce back with resilience and confidence, as it services an ever-stronger internal market and continues its search for global trading partners.
	Let us make no mistake: a formal shift of power eastwards will present opportunities as well as challenges. Our nation must be ready to exploit those opportunities, but I am increasingly concerned that the twin burden of high levels of public and private debt, along with a rudderless, untrusted financial sector, risks the movement of global business away from our shores. No doubt we will also face the emergence of deep social divides, should we continue down the dangerous path of consuming today and making future generations pay tomorrow for what we consume.
	As a great defender of free markets, free trade and global capitalism, I am willing to bet that, while the Government currently have an important role in stabilising and revitalising our confidence-battered economy, it will eventually be hard work, enterprise and freedom in the marketplace that will ensure that our economy thrives again. If the best of economic times are to lie ahead, the moral and economic case must also be made for a smaller, more efficient state, and the untapped appetite among our fellow Britons for financial discipline and prudence must be encouraged.
	We face letting down a whole generation, but the Conservative party already has a wide range of solutions to our declining competitiveness through our education and social affairs agenda. Long term, we must focus on promoting diverse and versatile skills, aspiration and mobility among our population. Yes, there is no doubt that the state must offer some security in these times of extreme need, but that aspect of its function should not overshadow the long-term importance of promoting flair, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. It is only through those three factors that we can ensure prosperous times ahead.
	I am sorry that my message is slightly negative and depressing, but we are living in difficult times. I hope that the Government will take on board many of these issues, including the many long-term concerns that should be in the forefront of our minds as we look in the short term at the proposals in the Queen's Speech. I look forward to hearing other Members' contributions, even if they stick rather more closely to the home affairs and justice agenda.

David Davis: I shall be extremely brief, lest I lose this enormous audience. I want to focus on the famous, and regular, line in the Queen's Speech:
	"Other measures will be laid before you."
	A number of measures are not in the Queen's Speech. One has been promised in the long run by the Government, and I shall make an argument for accelerating it. Another was promised in the draft Queen's Speech, but has been deferred. A third has been made necessary by this morning's judgment by the European Court of Human Rights.
	During the course of this year, we have had serious intellectual battles over the counter-terrorism strategy. Much of that has been about freedom and individual rights, but a good deal has also been about how successful the strategy is, and how successful it needs to be. The Government have rightly said that the threats to our people are increasing on a day-by-day basis, that they are growing by about 25 per cent. per annum, and that they are difficult for the police and the other agencies to deal with. That is an argument that the Government have put forward to support repressive measures, including the proposed increase in detention without charge from 28 days to 42.
	The first missing Bill that I want to discuss is the Bill to allow the use of intercept evidence in court. If we had such a Bill, we would not face the problems that we are facing today, with a provision for 28 days' detention, let alone 42. In our debates, we have often raised the issue of the United States. After 9/11, the US faces at least as great a terrorist threat as we do, yet it seems to cope with it much better than we do. It is able to bring charges within two days of arrest, and full indictment within 10 days. It can do that because it has a combination of laws that allows it to act without visiting injustice or oppression on its people. Among the most important is its ability to use intercept evidence.
	Earlier this year, I visited Washington and talked to representatives of all the counter-terrorism agencies and of the Department of Justice. I had the advantage of being able to talk to the Deputy Secretary of State for Justice who dealt with terrorism. He told me in some detail about how intercept worked. He made it clear that the use of intercept evidence in court was fundamental to two types of judicial success. One was in dealing with terrorism, and the other was in dealing with gangsterism—the mafia and organised crime. They are similar targets in many ways, and it is true to say that the American judicial system has had fantastic success in dealing with gangsterism and considerable success in dealing with terrorism. It all hangs on intercept.
	The Deputy Secretary of State for Justice talked us through a case. The first thing he said was, "If we have any of these cases, the jury wonder where the juicy tapes are"—his words—"if they do not hear them in court." Juries have come to depend on the intercept evidence as a central part of the judicial process. The US process involves a two-stage approach. The first is a so-called CIPA—Classified Information Procedures Act—hearing, at which it is decided what can be presented to the court. In his words, "If we win the CIPA hearing, the case goes straight to plea bargaining." There is almost never a full case thereafter.
	That is very different from our major terrorism trials. In the past couple of years we have had enormous trials at huge cost. I am thinking not just of the cost in money terms. The cost of the paralysis of our agencies in supporting those court cases is incalculable. It is extremely important that we understand the power of the intercept evidence usable in court, particularly in conjunction with a reasonably aggressive approach to plea bargaining, especially with the minor players. If we succeed in that, we will achieve a number of things. We will make it possible to try more people, to convict more people, to convict them with greater safety, and to convict them faster and more cheaply than we do at present. There are enormous benefits to be had for us, and we are probably the country in the world that would gain most from the use of intercept evidence, so it is rather surprising that we do not have that already.
	The Government have, quite properly, set up an advisory committee that is working on the matter. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) is a member of the committee. I spoke to him before the debate. He said that the committee was working hard on extremely complex matters. I will not be present for the winding-up speeches, unfortunately, but I hope that the Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor will be able to tell us that the committee will not be short of resources. If it were inadequately resourced, that would be a considerable false economy. I should like to see the relevant Bill brought forward.
	The Bill that was missing, which was mentioned by the Liberal spokesman and by my hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary, is the communications and data Bill. It was in the draft Queen's Speech, but not in the most recent version. The Bill has gone for consultation in early 2009, and I understand that we will get a published Bill thereafter. I suspect that it was pulled because the central component of it, the idea of an enormous database of, effectively, intercept data—data showing e-mail addresses, phone calls and internet accesses—was seen as being horrifically unpopular when it eventually became widely known that that would happen. It would make the argument over 42 days look like a picnic. In the public view, unlike a 42-days measure, it would appear to impinge on everybody's privacy and therefore be enormously unpopular.
	As in the case of 42 days, I talked through these issues with the agencies and the police forces. I had all sorts of secret briefings. I hope nobody will go to prison for it. The outcome was pretty straightforward. Telephone and internet data are already retained by the companies as a result of European directive 2006/24, from memory, so there is no question of the data being there or not being there. The simple question is whether the data should be held in a huge database by the state. That has all sorts of enormous disadvantages. There will inevitably be suspicion about why it must be held there, as it does not add a jot to the available information.
	The only worry one might have in that respect is that although getting such data out of the companies requires an explicit warrantry process—rather relevant in the House today—and therefore requires our agencies to be under proper control and under the law, one could not be quite so confident about a central database. There is also a fear that we might see attempts at data mining—trying to spot suspicious characters through their telephone and e-mail records. Such an ambition, if it exists, would be daft. Most of the evidence on data mining shows that it is pretty ineffective. Nevertheless, it would be a massive intrusion on people's privacy.
	I hope that if and when the measure comes back, it comes back without that database. If it provides for such a database, the Government can guarantee themselves an interesting year of battles on the matter. Indeed, I can guarantee the Government an interesting year of battles on the matter. I want to see the ability to intercept, as I said in my opening argument. I want to see the agencies able to do what they need to do. What I do not want to do is to give any agency of Government the ability to go on a fishing expedition without proper warrantry control. It is very simple. My understanding is that most of the agencies and the police forces agree with that, and that only one or two agencies have a different view. The Government and the Home Office must be firm with them and make it clear to them that that is not acceptable to the British public.
	Both Opposition Front-Bench speakers have also touched on the last issue that I want to mention: today's excellent judgment—I never thought that I would ever say this—from the European Court of Human Rights. I would have been much happier if we had made the decision ourselves. I do not think that the main Opposition parties differ much on human rights; the issue is about who should make the decision about them. However, the ECHR judgment is excellent—and, as the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) said, its unanimity is outstanding. I thought that the decision would be split, because it was taking so long to come out, but it was not.

Charles Walker: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in the 12th Queen's Speech debate under the current Government. I imagine that there will be one more—unlucky No. 13. I sincerely hope that is unlucky for this Labour Government, not for the Conservative party, in that the 13th Queen's Speech will be the last one that we get from them for some years to come.
	I will try to stick to the Home Office brief, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I am sure that you will forgive me if I stray slightly. I do not think that a huge number of Members are waiting to speak, so I should not be putting too many noses out of joint, but if I do, I am sure that you will point it out to me.
	Before I move on to the substantive part of my speech, I should like to focus on the operational independence of the police, about which a lot has been said over the past two or three days. Let me point out that the operational independence of the police was compromised about three years ago, during the debate over 90 days' detention, when chief constables from around the country were urged by the Government to write to Members of Parliament asking them to support 90 days. That seemed to break a long-held convention that chief constables did not involve themselves in the day-to-day business of Parliament. From that moment on, the rot set in.
	The rot has been particularly noticeable in the Metropolitan police, whose problems have been well documented. The commissioner has just retired early, and of course there are the ongoing problems with last week's raid on the offices of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) here, in his constituency and at his home. I hope that the Home Office takes a good long look at the operations of the Metropolitan police, because it seems to be becoming dysfunctional as an organisation, with a group of fiefdoms not talking to one another and pursuing their own different agendas. The public in London are beginning to lose confidence in the Metropolitan police, and we cannot afford for that to happen at the moment, with the Olympics just around the corner, in a little over three years' time, and the daily threat posed by terrorists.
	As regards counter-terrorism and legislation on counter-terrorism, I remain concerned about the erosion of civil liberties. Our democracy, which we have treasured over the past 400 years, has made this country what it is today, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) pointed out. We remain one of the richest economies in the world, despite the current difficulties in the financial markets. We have wonderful things that have been brought about by democracy. We have, still, a thriving trade union movement. We have an NHS. We have wealth creation. We have vibrant and open debate. Those things, collectively, have made this country what it is.
	I am concerned that over the past few years we have taken many of our traditions for granted and cast some of them aside. We have put aside trial by jury in certain cases—complex cases, admittedly, but our legal system should be capable of rising to the challenge of being put to the test through complex cases. We have seen the introduction of double jeopardy, whereby someone can be tried twice for the same crime. Those sorts of powers have been used by dictatorships through the ages and across the world in order to finally find a jury or judge who will give them the result that they want. Double jeopardy has been used to restrict people's liberties and to corrupt the legal system.
	There have been restrictions on our free speech. This is a well worn example, but it is still highly relevant. A few years ago, a woman stood at the Cenotaph and read out, very gently and quietly, the names of our war dead—the young men and women who had fallen in Iraq and, I believe, Afghanistan, serving their country. She was arrested and detained. That is not a Great British thing to do. It is not the British way, and we should rightly remain concerned about it.
	We talk continually, still, about the merits of ID cards. I am implacably opposed to ID cards, as I believe many of my constituents are. This country belongs to me. I was born here. I have a right to be here. I do not have to prove myself to anyone, nor should I have to. Yes, there are problems with the immigration system, problems that I feel the Government are largely responsible for, but the citizens of this country should not pay for the Government's failings by sacrificing more of their freedoms.

Mark Field: My hon. Friend makes his point with great passion. I very much agree with it, and the contribution made earlier on the matter of the DNA database by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis). Would my hon. Friend accept—and I hope that the Minister will take this point on board—that DNA technology is important, but that in 40 or 50 years' time we will have DNA mark 2 or mark 3 technology that will be considerably superior to what we have now? It will show up many of the deficiencies that my right hon. and hon. Friends have pointed out.

Alan Beith: It is probably mainly to do with a perception that there was a need for change and a means to bring it about. We must all hope that the election of Barack Obama and his Administration satisfies some of those aspirations, which led people to take part. It may not so fully do so, as that is difficult to achieve. In our system, many people assume that nothing they do will make any difference. They have seen the two main parties grow rather more similar in recent years in the ideas and prescriptions that they put forward. That might change again—who knows?
	People have seen a system in which their votes do not seem to count—that point was referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne)—because of the electoral system that we have, but the crucial difference is that when people see that their votes make a difference, they are more likely to vote.
	I was elected to the House in a by-election 35 years ago last month. The turnout was 84 per cent. and the poll took place well on in the year, when the register was quite old. My majority was 57 votes. People knew that the by-election was close. They could see that their vote was crucial to achieving change. Unless we can get more of our electorate to feel that their vote will change not just perhaps the personnel but the direction of government, we will continue to have low participation.
	The next thing that is missing but might have been expected in the Gracious Speech is any reference to legislation on the Bill of Rights and responsibilities. Instead, we have, in that time-honoured phrase, the Government taking a step back from what they originally intended to do:
	"My Government will continue to take forward proposals on constitutional renewal".
	So no Bill on rights and responsibilities. I am quite pleased about that, because there is a deal of confusion around that subject in Government circles, and some other circles as well.
	There is the idea that we can somehow change our corpus of rights by introducing a separate British Bill of Rights. I am very sceptical of that notion. We are signatories to the European convention on human rights, and even if we repealed the Human Rights Act 1998 and stopped our access to it in our own courts, we would still be signatories to that convention and the process involving the DNA database case—which everybody, certainly on the Opposition Benches, is celebrating today and which has led to a decision that the Government's position is not lawful—would still be available to us. Although it is advantageous that we can access the convention in the British courts, the European convention will determine our rights for many years to come. I see danger in any pretence that we can subtract from those rights. Some Conservatives seem to think that we can do so—although we cannot unless we withdraw from the convention—or that we can usefully start tinkering around, adding a few extra rights and giving them the same force. I am not even comfortable with that, either.
	At the same time, the Government confuse the notion of responsibilities with rights. In making what is, on the face of it, a reasonable proposition that people should care about their responsibilities as well as their rights—a proposition that we could all agree to—they go on to imply that all of that could be put into a piece of legislation or a charter so that rights and responsibilities had the same status. That is nonsense, and quite dangerous nonsense too.
	There are certain responsibilities to keep the law, which if we do not carry out we lose rights. We may be sent to prison because we have broken the criminal law, but we cannot have a process whereby we start taking people's rights away if they do not exercise as much social responsibility as is desirable or because, on some subjective measure, they are not behaving as responsibly as we would like.
	I want people to do socially responsible things—not just in the negative sense of not doing bad things, but in the positive sense of taking an active part in their community, helping community organisations and being involved in all sorts of good things such as charitable work. I am absolutely delighted that so much of that goes on in our country, but I simply cannot get my head around the idea that if people do not behave to the fullest extent of responsibility that they could achieve, we may somehow treat that as a rights issue, saying, "You haven't helped with the scout troop, so you will lose a bit of freedom of speech. You haven't stood for the parish council, so you will lose some of your freedom of association." Those two things are very different. Social responsibility is something that we can encourage and try to develop in society. Rights are something that we make subject to a framework of law and justiciable, and one cannot mix up the two concepts as the Government are doing. I am quite pleased that we will not see that in the Queen's Speech.
	Instead we have a vague and, from this Government, unlikely notion of "strengthening Parliament." There is one specific measure that the Government can cite as likely to achieve that: the powers in relation to war and peace—the parliamentary process when this country goes to war. That is right in principle and, in the case of Iraq, actually happened. As one of those who voted against the Iraq war, I must recognise that we did have a vote in this House about it, but the idea that that will strengthen Parliament is a bit fanciful. As we all know from that and other experiences, many Members feel pressured by the fact that our troops are stationed and ready to take action into not voting against what the Government are doing. Others feel that if they vote against their Government in those circumstances they are effectively calling on them to resign at the most difficult period for the country for any Government to resign. The measure is right in principle but it does not really add to the corpus of real parliamentary power.
	Among the things that would change Parliament is a reformed electoral system which did not give Governments automatic majorities and made it much less likely that Governments had the kind of majority that enabled them to ignore Parliament, and which stopped the Government's stranglehold on the House. We now have more Ministers than ever before. We have lots of unpaid Ministers. We used to talk about the payroll but we now have Ministers who are prepared to take on the loyalty and limitations of being in government without even being paid a ministerial salary for doing so. There are now quite a lot of them, but the total effect is to add to the number of people on the Government side of the House who are automatically committed to supporting the Government unless they resign their office.

Alan Beith: Yes; what a young figure the Prime Minister cut, but we all remember him in those days.
	Clearly, all Governments have to ensure that they can conduct their business, but they now do so within a framework of freedom of information, where they need to be a little less sensitive about information, much of which could be claimed as public under the Freedom of Information Act in any case. When situations arise that are to do with the leaking of confidential information, the basis for dealing with them should be the civil service code, buttressed by a civil service Act.
	While making no comment on the current case, it is my view that if a Member were to take action that seemed to be designed to extract information from a civil servant by putting pressure on them, that would be a matter for parliamentary standards. That would be the appropriate way to deal with that, rather than through the criminal code. When Douglas Hurd was Home Secretary, he introduced substantial changes so that the criminal code was more properly confined to official secrets in the area of national security, and disciplinary processes other than the criminal law were thought appropriate for the rest of Government business. That was an important change that which enshrined in a revised Official Secrets Act. Having served on the Intelligence and Security Committee for more than a decade, I am well aware of the importance of safeguarding national security and of rigorous protection of the secrecy on which it depends, but that has also reinforced in my mind the importance of distinguishing between that and the protection of the Government's ability to hold discussions. That is a significant point, and it involves issues such as freedom of information and the sort of processes that have occasionally brought to light matters that needed to be brought to light, embarrassing as they were to the Government.
	Let me make one last comment on the current situation, since it is germane to the justice and home affairs section of the Queen's Speech debate and to the issues that occupied us yesterday and earlier today in relation to the rights of Members of Parliament and their constituents. We will do ourselves a considerable disservice if we politicise the discussion of how we protect the privileges of Members and their constituents, and of Members and those who bring important information to them. I have detected several dangers in that regard. I have seen no evidence suggesting that Ministers did anything more than press the button of complaint that there were too many leaks going on in their Department, and once that button was pressed processes began, leading ultimately to arrest and a search in this place, which are causing us a great deal of anxiety. If there is evidence to the contrary, that may be disproved, but my initial perception is that, despite what some have speculated, Ministers have not engaged in any more detailed involvement than to say, "Can nobody rid me of this turbulent priest?" To concentrate on actions that Ministers probably did not take unwisely politicises the issue.
	Similarly, however, the Government must look very carefully at how they are handling the matter, including the motion that the House will debate on Monday, because if they move to the kind of defensive position I have heard in some of the comments from the Labour Benches and seek to narrow the ability of this House to assert, within proper limits, the privileges and rights on which our constituents depend, we will do a great disservice to Parliament. The House needs to find a way of acting together to assert and protect the right of constituents and others to bring before Parliament matters which Parliament needs to know.

Fiona Mactaggart: I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) and her concerns about electoral registration. I have the same problem in my constituency, with postal votes meaning that that ballot is not private in some families, and the people who lose their independence as a result are usually women. In my constituency, we have also seen a corruption of the electoral register, which has been exposed in a legal case and reflects fundamental flaws in the system. The Bill now before Parliament does not take is not taking such matters sufficiently seriously.
	The main issues that I wish to address have been influenced by what has happened in my constituency in the past 10 days as a series of incidents has shocked the people of Slough. About 100 yards from a poster saying "Slough against knife crime"—the day before I had had my photograph taken in front of it—a woman was murdered and another person seriously wounded with a knife. That was probably related to a domestic incident. A couple of days later, the deputy mayor of Slough was shot, probably with a crossbow. Just a couple of days ago, a woman who was clearing the ice off her car was run over by someone who was trying to steal it.
	All those incidents happened within days of each other in my constituency. I can tell my constituents that their chances of being the victim of crime is lower now than at any time in the last 20 years, and that is true—but such incidents make them profoundly fearful about the rarest of crimes. Neighbourhood action groups are an important way for the community to express their concerns about crime to the police, and they are most worried about parking, criminal damage, graffiti and kids hanging about the streets, not the sort of incidents I have described. Those are the issues that get brought up, because they are more common in a community than the more violent ones that I have described, but the latter can create profound fear, and it is important to ask ourselves whether we are doing enough to deal with that.
	One of the things that would help—this is not a matter for legislation—is faster progress on the outer London allowance for police officers, so that the Metropolitan police stop stealing our officers. I have become a bore about that issue, but it is a serious matter for my constituency.
	Another thing that would help is effective punishment when people are convicted of crimes. I was glad to welcome the Justice Secretary and the Home Secretary to my constituency earlier this week. My right hon. Friends came as part of the relaunch of the scheme that means that people who are sentenced to serve community sentences can be seen to be serving them. I am confident that that will mean that instead of 12 young lads leaning on rakes and not doing very much in the local park—I know why they are there, but most of the general public probably think that their taxes are paying for them to be there—they can be made to do something other than lean on their rakes. Effective community sentencing is absolutely critical, but we need to deal with other kinds of sentence too.
	I am depressed about the slow progress being made on the Corston report. Women are, overwhelmingly, not violent offenders, yet they are disproportionately sentenced to jail, which is very ineffective in changing their behaviour and rehabilitating them. Jailing a mother is likely to create a future generation of criminals, so I hope that there will be faster progress on that matter in future.
	Another crime that we have experienced in Slough over the past year is people trafficking. One of the few convictions in Britain for child trafficking was in my constituency. I am glad that the police and the prosecution authorities took the matter seriously. When I talked to those involved it was clear to me that people trafficking has become the preferred profiteering mechanism for organised crime, over and above drug trafficking. It is more profitable. It is horrifying that a child is worth £100,000 a year to their trafficker for doing nothing more than begging and selling  The Big Issue. I am referring to a real case. In a year, the controller of the child made that amount of profit from the child.
	We have to bear down more comprehensively and effectively on people trafficking, which is one of the reasons why I was glad to hear of the Home Secretary's commitment to sign the convention very soon. However, we need more effective policing, so I was disappointed to learn that the Metropolitan police, having taken taxpayers' money to open a trafficking policing centre, decided to pocket the money—as far as I could see—and close it again. How were the Metropolitan police able to get away with that? A real issue of accountability is involved. The Queen's Speech talked of improving the accountability of policing, but on a matter on which I believe the whole House is united—

Fiona Mactaggart: I am glad to hear that. None the less, the matter raises the issue of the accountability of the Metropolitan police. I shall say more about police accountability because, with respect to the Justice Secretary, it sounds to me as though we have just been experiencing a bit of brinkmanship. The Metropolitan police decided they wanted to up the ante and get a bit more money from the Home Office, so they did what people do when they want more money from their paymasters, and threatened to shut something they really cared about. It sounds to me as if that is what happened, and I am concerned about some of the police accountability proposals in the Queen's Speech, because I think we shall see more of that kind of stuff.
	Under the proposed new methods for police accountability, there will be real concern and argument about operational matters—as we saw in the House today—and the police will be constantly looking over their shoulder. There will also be more of the brinkmanship that I described—and I should be grateful for reassurance that that will not happen.
	On the general issue of people trafficking, the other group who are most at risk are women trafficked for sexual purposes. One of the reasons why that becomes more possible is the commodification of sex, which has become quite common in a number of areas, two of which the Queen's Speech proposes to deal with—and both of which I profoundly welcome.
	The first area is lap dancing. It is extraordinary that the lap-dancing industry can claim that it does not represent sexual encounter establishments. In my understanding, there is more sexual encounter in a lap-dancing club than in any of the bookshops and sex toy shops that require such a licence. I am very glad indeed that—this is rather late, but it is very welcome—it is proposed to require such premises to be licensed as sexual encounter establishments. Although quite legal, those establishments profoundly exploit young women, who usually have to pay for the right to work in them, pay for their uniforms and pay for their drinks. As a result, they can end up out of pocket after an evening's work, and their managers deliberately ensure that there are more dancers than customers, in a way that creates gross exploitation of women.
	The same kind of context creates the exploitation of women who are being sold for sexual services through prostitution. I am glad that the proposal in the Queen's Speech is to focus not on those women, who are so often victimised, but much more on their customers, and to create a strict liability offence that is parallel to a number of other offences in Britain. If someone is driving with bald tyres, they are committing a strict liability offence. Even if someone did not know that their tyres were bald, it need only be proved that were driving the car, and that the tyres were bald, to show that they were responsible. Again, if someone employs someone who does not have the right to work, the employer is committing a strict liability offence. In my view, it should be exactly the same, at the least, for prostitution.
	I hope that in this case, we do not fall into the trap that some other European countries, such as Finland, have fallen into, where prosecutions have not taken place. I feel that targeting the purchaser is the best way to protect women. I hold that view not because of any piousness about selling sexual services, but because I believe that prostitution, as it is practised, represents a gross example of violence against women. Between 1996 and 2003, 72 women prostitutes were murdered in Britain. Most of them were selling themselves on the street. More have been murdered since. If we enforce the new proposals, it will be a fitting memorial to Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Annette Nicholls and Paula Clennell, all of whom were murdered so recently in Ipswich.
	We should follow those other countries that have ensured that the target is the purchaser. That is the trend now. Some Opposition Members would suggest that we need to regularise and legalise the whole trade. But in countries that have done that, such as the Netherlands, the trade has grown, and more women are subjected to violence as a consequence. It is no accident that Nevada, which has the most legal prostitution of any state in the United States of America, also has the highest homicide rate for women. But I urge the Home Office, while targeting the punter, to remove the legal offences that women who are in prostitution are prosecuted for. The Government should get rid of the term, "common prostitute". They should get rid of criminal sanctions for soliciting. Women should not be fined or jailed for soliciting, because many of them are controlled. Arguably, they should get rid of the practice of prosecuting two women who work together for brothel-keeping, because in those circumstances, we could put the responsibility where it truly lies. If the logic of the Home Secretary's position is that the responsibility is the client's, exploited women should not be criminalised. If they were not, they would be much more likely to report the violent punters who are every day, in every town, raping, hitting and damaging women in prostitution. Until we can make those women safe, the steps that have been announced are insufficient.

Fiona Mactaggart: If we put effort behind any law, it will work better. That is obvious. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that we could do that, but I have spoken to people who are involved in the prostitution scene in Ipswich, and although they have managed effectively to end street prostitution in Ipswich using current laws, and with superhuman effort, they would generally welcome the kind of initiative proposed. They would also welcome greater clarity concerning their ability to target demand, because they have been able to protect women in Ipswich more effectively by focusing on demand.
	Those people provided exit support and better nurturing to women who were in prostitution, and helped them to leave prostitution. They used some of the pressure mechanisms that still exist for women who were trying hard to stay in prostitution, but they could have done with more effective powers. That is exactly why countries such as Lithuania, Finland and South Korea have introduced such legislation. In almost every case, the trigger point was women's deaths. In South Korea, 14 women died in a fire in a brothel because the brothel-keeper had locked the doors so that people could not get out from inside, but could get in from outside. The Swedish law that prohibits the purchase of sexual services was introduced following the murder of a woman prostitute. If we followed our partner countries, we could make women safer.
	On the immigration proposals in the Bill, I am anxious that the probationary citizenship proposals and the permanent residence proposals that will substitute for the current, fairly clear, route to indefinite leave to remain are much more contingent on certain issues. As a consequence, people might have insecure status for longer, which might allow them to be exploited. I am concerned about that lack of clarity, as clarity has always been a good part of Britain's immigration law compared with other European countries, where people's status might be a bit insecure for rather a long time.
	In Britain, it has been fairly clear where such people are on the ladder, and when they have reached a particular point, they have known that they had indefinite leave to remain and that they could apply for citizenship. The new law is much less clear and depends much more on short-term changes in the immigration rules. That will create the kind of insecurity, for communities, that we have previously avoided by the clarity in our immigration law. That would be unwelcome. I would be glad if my anxiety about that could be proved unfounded, and I would like to know what proposals are in train to ensure that people are clear and confident about their status.
	I want to finish by making another complaint—I am sorry about that. I welcome the things that we are doing; it is just the details that make me frustrated. My final complaint is about the proposals for the cohesion fund, or whatever it is to be called. It is a surcharge on immigration fees in order to help local communities to deal with the consequences of migration. The local community in Slough is an obvious example of a place that needs such help. We have had a 10 per cent. increase in the birth rate, and we are expecting 11 new primary classes, but we only have the money for two. We could use the whole of the fund, and still need more. That is part of the problem with the fund: it will raise expectations but fail to fulfil them.
	There is worse, however. The people who cannot be charged under the proposals are EU citizens, and many of the recent arrivals have been from the EU. Those who will be eligible for the charge are therefore the wives, husbands and children of long-term residents, many of whom are British citizens, who are already paying hundreds of pounds for their visas. A wife will pay more than £1,000 for her visa and application for permanent residence; a child will pay £515. On top of that, there is now to be a surcharge. That action in itself will damage race relations. It will place an unfair burden on our ethnic minority communities, and the tension that already exists between different minorities in Britain will exacerbated by the charge. I urge the Home Office to think again. I believe that the proposal is well meant, and that it is designed to help places such as Slough to deal with the real challenges that they face, but I do not believe that people have researched its consequences, which could be profoundly damaging to race relations in the town that I represent.

Andrew MacKinlay: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that and pleased that I gave way to him, because my theme is that the situation needs to be continually monitored by Ministers and that common sense should prevail. The Zimbabwean case is overwhelming. However, there are other groups of people who have no realistic prospect of being able to return to their countries but face enormous emotional strain in terms of being able to maintain themselves. I do not want to do any injustice to those very vulnerable groups, but the potential for their carrying out petty crime therefore increases, because they have to survive. I urge the Justice Secretary to tell the House that he will revisit this matter and do what he can to ensure that common sense prevails. It would be in the interests of the United Kingdom, as regards our economy and given the pressures on our social services and welfare expenditure, if they were allowed to work.
	I hope that the Justice Secretary will speak to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about some of the arrangements that are in place. In an overwhelming majority of United Kingdom high commissions and embassies, the quality of the method by which people are processed is very high. However, in one or two instances there are locally engaged companies—private firms of security guards and so on—who do not treat people who have gone to consulates appropriately. In some exceptional circumstances, I have deep anxiety about their propriety and conduct. Our high commissioners and ambassadors should be reminded to probe and test that which often happens outside the precincts of their offices, where people are queuing up, to ensure that there are no irregularities and that United Kingdom citizens who are not white are nevertheless treated as United Kingdom citizens. People are sometimes treated in a discriminatory way, not by FCO officials but by those who are employed to marshal the people queuing up to go in. I make these comments in the context of the borders, immigration and citizenship Bill and the draft immigration simplification Bill.
	The Justice Secretary knows that when he was Foreign Secretary I repeatedly pleaded for the United Kingdom to have a mission in Kyrgyzstan. That is relevant because the United Kingdom was recently substantially embarrassed by the fact that its officials in Almaty, the old capital of Kazakhstan, failed to process an application for visas by musicians and performers who had been invited to the United Kingdom by the ambassador of Kyrgyzstan. That was disgraceful and is indicative of the fact that we do not have a proper mission in the capital of Kyrgyzstan. We should have for a whole variety of reasons, and when we become clumsy in that way, the point I have repeatedly made is underscored.
	The Justice Secretary might reflect on one thing when these Bills are being drafted and prepared. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) was Home Secretary, he introduced legislation that dignified the award of United Kingdom citizenship, which was an extremely good thing. Provision was made largely for civic dignitaries, such as the mayor of a council, to award citizenship at a ceremony. I am somewhat jealous about that. Hon. Members—perhaps including you, Madam Deputy Speaker—have actually sponsored, counselled and encouraged people to get British citizenship. I would like the honour of administering or presiding over such a ceremony, and perhaps legislation could be amended, if that is necessary, to include hon. Members in the list of people who can do that. It is with immense pride that we have achieved this outcome, and why should some here today, gone tomorrow mayor—although some are very good—have the right to make the award when some of us have seen the process through to that point?

Andrew MacKinlay: Of course. I totally endorse what the hon. Gentleman says.
	I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) in her place. I listened carefully to what she said about the madrassahs and clearance checks. I want to say how right she is, and I think that most hon. Members would agree. It is an act of appalling discrimination that these centres are somehow exempt—they are not exempt in law, but nobody is homing in on the problem. That takes place against a backdrop of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and many other ministries being very conscious of the issue. The Church of England has a new code dealing with vicarages and rectories. There has to be separate meeting room space, and it refers to the question of propriety and how people are dealt with or accompanied, plus the checks to which my hon. Friend referred. It is intolerable—in the sense that days shall pass from now—that there is no use of the existing law in respect of those Madrassahs. The overriding issue is that children are vulnerable, but the situation is also grossly unfair to the boy scouts and the various churches and organisations that have addressed the problem. I hope that the Justice Secretary will take that matter on.
	On political parties and elections, the Labour Government have tried, with a lot of good intent, to improve our electoral administration, but in many cases we have made things more complicated. Some of us are very disappointed in the performance of the Electoral Commission, and I notice that in the remaining orders and notices, there is a motion to pay the chairman of the Electoral Commission £100,000 a year. I am waiting for that motion to come up—I have watched out for it every day—because I intend to divide the House on the matter. Frankly, I think that £100,000 a year is far too much money. Even if it is a full-time job, that is too much, but I suspect that if we looked at the small print, we would find that it is one of these jobs that take two or three days a week. I would like the Government to reflect on the fact that £100,000 is far too much. I do not want to labour the point, but it is too much, and I am saying, so that everyone knows, that I will divide the House on the matter if I get the opportunity, and I hope that I command some support.
	The list of draft Bills contains a measure on floods and water. I represent Tilbury, which is part of the Thames Gateway, where the Government are properly hoping for and looking to regeneration, quality places for people to live and work, and the creation of skills, especially in my borough of Thurrock. I fully endorse that, but not at any price.
	Anybody who is familiar with the terrain knows that Tilbury was built on the marshes of the Thames. Irish labourers in the 19th century cut the docks and I would describe Tilbury town as Lowry-esque. It has great attraction—we are proud of its traditional docks, which have provided work for more than 120 years. However, between the town and Chadwell St. Mary lies part of the Thames marsh, which fulfils traditional green belt policy. It is a lung and it is attractive against the Lowry-esque landscape. People covet that land and I want to make it clear that Andrew Mackinlay does not support its development. It is vital to the people of Tilbury and Chadwell St. Mary in my borough. Although I support the broad programme of development, I will not support building on that land for a variety of reasons—the green belt, questions of flooding and irrigation, and compelling water engineering issues. I hope that I would get the Secretary of State's support if there were an appeal.
	I note that there is also a draft communications data Bill. It appears to be primarily designed to regularise matters or provide for the state to marshal information.  [Interruption.] I am told that it is dead. That is disappointing. In any event, my point is that the Justice Secretary, who has overall responsibility for data protection and freedom of information, needs to revisit that in the context of Whitehall. I sent data protection applications across Whitehall—to every Ministry—in the summer for good reasons. In my applications, I asked for disclosure of anything held on me in relation to my work as a Member of Parliament. That is important—I would not raise the matter if it were purely personal. I wanted to know what the Ministries held.
	Conduct and stewardship of those applications by Ministries was patchy. Some were good and diligent, but others wrote back saying, "I don't know who you are." Although I applied on House of Commons headed paper and included a photostat of my passport, some insisted that they did not know who I was.
	There is also a disparity between Departments on charging. There is a power to charge a nominal amount—I do not mind that, but the disparity is not good. There should be consistency across government. In some cases, getting the information was like extracting teeth from a whale.
	The worst performer to date is the Cabinet Secretary—I think that his name is Macdonald. He has not replied, despite the 40-day limit. If the Cabinet Secretary cannot get it right, how can we expect proper action down the pyramid and across Whitehall?
	I raise the matter not for myself but for all the others who have submitted applications under the Data Protection Act 1998, which the Justice Secretary piloted through the House when he was Home Secretary, and of which he can justifiably be proud. It is inconsistently applied and needs beefing up. All I ask today is that he examine the matter because amending legislation might be required, but I think that people need a rocket put under them, starting with the Cabinet Secretary.

Nick Herbert: Yesterday we saw the Lord Chancellor, in all his finery, skilfully walking backwards, which he did most expertly. That was entirely appropriate, because retreat has been the story of the Prime Minister's programme on constitutional renewal.
	Back in July last year, when the new Prime Minister made his first statement to the House, he promised a
	"national debate...founded on the conviction that the best answer to disengagement from our democracy is to strengthen our democracy."—[ Official Report, 3 July 2007; Vol. 462, c. 819.]
	Constitutional change was not peripheral to the Government's agenda; it was central to their programme—"founded on...conviction". That conviction cannot have been very profound, because just 18 months later, the constitutional agenda has all but disappeared. It has become clear that the Prime Minister had no great vision of a new settlement, just the immediate political challenge of dissociating himself from his predecessor.
	The Prime Minister soon discovered that just repeating the word "renewal" did not renew anything, least of all his reputation. The work of change did not work, so spin doctors were fired and a new purpose was sought. Now the Prime Minister has found a different posture, on the global stage—"Never mind British democratic renewal; it's time to save the world." A supposed programme for long-term constitutional change has now been cast aside in a second, desperate attempt to establish a new narrative.
	What we are left with is neither reform nor renewal, just tinkering. Eighteen months on from the grand promise, we do not even have a proper constitutional renewal Bill, just an ongoing draft Bill, with an indication that the real thing will be introduced when time allows, and we all know what that means. The Prime Minister said:
	"Constitutional change will not be the work of just one Bill or one year or one Parliament".—[ Official Report, 3 July 2007; Vol. 462, c. 815.]
	Now we know what he meant. At this rate, we will not see a constitutional renewal Bill until the next Parliament. We are left with a few draft measures that are worthy enough in their own right, but completely inadequate to address the real problems of public disengagement and imbalance in our political system.
	Last year, the Justice Secretary told us:
	"I hope that a consensus can be achieved on the constitutional renewal Bill".—[ Official Report, 7 November 2007; Vol. 467, c. 148.]
	However, he cannot even find consensus among those on his own Benches. His predecessor, Lord Falconer, said that the Bill was not so much constitutional renewal as constitutional retreat. The Joint Committee on the Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill, which was chaired by the right hon. Gentleman's colleague, the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Michael Jabez Foster), said:
	"it is difficult to discern the principles underpinning it,"
	which is a polite way of saying, "It's a dog's breakfast." More than one commentator has described the Bill as a miscellaneous provisions Bill. Professor Adam Tomkins of the university of Glasgow told the Joint Committee that
	"to call this Bill a Constitutional Renewal Bill is an exaggeration...of both the terms 'constitutional' and...'renewal'."
	The Bill contains some worthwhile measures, among them the repeal of sections of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, which has seen people arrested for reading out the names of the dead at the Cenotaph, but which can apparently do nothing about the permanent encampment that has taken root in Parliament square. Citizens should not have to petition the police for the right to make themselves heard by Parliament. After all, it was the Prime Minister who said last October:
	"we can start immediately to make changes in our constitution and laws to safeguard and extend the liberties of our citizens,"
	which included
	"respecting and extending freedom of assembly".
	With the constitutional renewal Bill still only in draft form, will the Government consider including the provision to deal with the issue of protests in Parliament square in the policing and crime Bill instead, which is at least a real Bill and will be introduced in this Session? Perhaps the Metropolitan police does, after all, have enough to do at Westminster.
	The Justice Secretary is in full constitutional retreat. Last year, he promised to publish a Bill of rights and responsibilities. He travelled round the world talking about it. He delivered learned speeches to academic audiences. He even flew to Washington to tell the new world that he was going to modernise Magna Carta. Only new Labour could utter that phrase with no sense of irony or endorse its revolting suggestion that all our ancient rights need is a makeover from a spin doctor.
	What has happened to the Bill of Rights? The Justice Secretary's constitutional adviser, Lord Lester, has resigned, saying that the Government's proposals are unworkable. Since none of us has seen the proposals, it is hard to know. Where is the statement of British values? When does the Justice Secretary plan to publish it—on the new British day, perhaps? Last March, the Prime Minister said, "Today"—I emphasise the word "today"—the
	"Secretary for Justice is consulting throughout the country on a statement of values and on the case for a full British bill of rights".
	After nine months, will the Justice Secretary say how his consultation throughout the country is going? He cannot, of course, because it has not happened.
	The Prime Minister said last year that the consultation would begin "in the autumn". In October last year, the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills), told the House that he would "shortly be announcing" it. In November, he said that work was "still under way". By February this year, he claimed that the Government were "about to launch" it; then he said it was launching "before Easter". After Easter, they were still "finalising the process". In May this year, the Justice Secretary said he would be making an announcement "before the summer recess". The build-up to the statement of values is acquiring a tantric quality. The question must be asked how much value the Government believe this statement of values still has.  [Interruption.] I am glad the Home Secretary understood the reference.
	During the debate on last year's Queen's Speech, the Justice Secretary promised us
	"All the changes that...the Prime Minister...set out in his historic, first statement".—[ Official Report, 7 November 2007; Vol. 467, c. 146.]
	So let us have a look at that historic first statement.

Jack Straw: Of course I acknowledge that and I am grateful to my hon. Friend.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) raised a number of important issues. One was her concern about what she described as a cottage industry in certification that those seeking British citizenship had sufficient facility in the English language. I have discussed the matter with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and we will of course follow it up.
	My hon. Friend made an interesting point about madrassahs. I am sure she accepts that the vast majority of people of Asian heritage—certainly in my constituency—are concerned about having proper facility in the English language. They do not want bogus certificates, because they recognise that the English language is an important precondition for proper integration.
	Just because people can speak English does not mean that their community will be fully integrated, but I am in no doubt at all that there must be that facility and that they want that facility and the proper availability of classes in English as a second language. I have a number of madrassahs in my constituency, and the vast majority of them are properly moderated, properly checked and work satisfactorily, but I will follow up with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary the issue that my hon. Friend raises about whether there is, in general, a proper requirement for the same kind of Criminal Records Bureau check that she referred to in respect of herself.
	My hon. Friends the Members for Keighley and for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) both referred to concerns about electoral registration and the need for it to be improved, and the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills) is actively considering that matter in the context of the Political Parties and Elections Bill.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Slough also raised concerns about visa fees. I am afraid to say that I do not quite share her view, but, again, I will draw that to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) raised the issue of justice week and the concerns of trade unions about what they say are cuts in criminal justice budgets. There is some irony, because it was only in the summer that the Policy Exchange, in a report endorsed by the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), issued an attack on the Government for spending too much on criminal justice and the law and order system, saying that we now spend more as a proportion of our GDP on that than any other OECD country does. We spend a great deal; we spend more on legal aid and policing—I am very glad that we do—and as a part of that, there has been a 67 per cent. real-terms increase for probation. Where those people got the idea that there would be a 25 per cent. cut in probation funding I just do not know, because it is completely and utterly untrue. However, because of the impact that the world economic downturn has on Government revenues, spending on all public services will not rise in the near future as it has done in the past. So we must search more vigorously for efficiencies in the probation service, the Prison Service and the Court Service. I happen to know from my rather lengthy service as a Minister that it is rather surprising how efficiencies can be found if someone starts to search them out.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) raised the issue of Zimbabwean refugees, and whether they should be allowed to work—I will pass that on to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary—as well as commenting on the chair of the Electoral Commission. The appointment of the chair of the commission is made by Mr. Speaker, on the advice of the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission. I happen to be a member of that Committee, but in a minority. It is an appointment entirely within the purview of the House, unlike, for example, that of the Information Commissioner, which required the endorsement of the House—at my behest, as it were, in this case.
	Let me deal with the Marper judgment in respect of DNA. As my right hon. and hon. Friends will have seen from the wires, the European Court of Human Rights said about the holding of DNA, fingerprint and other samples by the criminal justice system in England and Wales that it was
	"struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature of the power of retention in England and Wales."
	It therefore declared that retention outwith article 8 of the European convention on human rights.
	I make first a preliminary point, which is germane to the issue of Bills of Rights and responsibilities—a subject to which I shall return later.  [Interruption.] The Conservatives have asked a lot of questions, and I am trying to answer them. This matter was considered under the Human Rights Act 1998 by the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Law Lords. On each occasion, the British courts found in our favour, so the Human Rights Act was not to blame—in fact, it provided important evidence about the margin of appreciation. The decision was made by the European Court of Human Rights.
	The hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield knows that if convention rights are incorporated into domestic law, as they are across Europe, the highest domestic court will sometimes be overturned by the Strasbourg Court, but that does not undermine the case for incorporation. My point is that we do better, where there is no margin of appreciation, if there is no incorporation. The one point on which there is agreement across both parties is that we remain committed to the convention itself. Of course, the hon. and learned Gentleman is in favour of the Human Rights Act.
	The judgment, which I have read in full today, is interesting. I recommend in particular paragraph 119, which draws out what the Court means by the
	"indiscriminate nature of the power of retention in England and Wales".
	It goes on to suggest that distinctions should be made between the nature of offences for which samples have been taken, and discusses whether they should be time-limited and whether there should be an independent review. Those matters will be considered by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary in consultation across Government. We have an obligation to report initially to the Council of Ministers and the Council of Europe by March.
	It was I who introduced, in section 82 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, the change that DNA samples could be retained even when there was a subsequent acquittal. I did that for a straightforward reason, because of a case involving a man who was charged with burglary. Before his trial for that burglary, a rape was committed, and the police matched a DNA sample that had been taken from him when he was arrested for burglary with a sample found on the person who alleged the rape. He was convicted of the rape, but was subsequently acquitted of the burglary. He appealed all the way up to the Law Lords, who said, on a construction of the law as it then stood, that the DNA sample had been retained unlawfully, and that the rape conviction, which was otherwise entirely proper, therefore had to be struck down.
	I thought that unjust to the victim—indeed, I am clear that it was—and so I introduced that measure. My recollection is that the measure had all-party support at the time, but I will check the record. The judgment might mean justice for those whose data is being held, but there is a much more important issue to consider: justice for the victims of the most serious and egregious offences, and ensuring that the offenders who commit such crimes are convicted.

Jack Straw: Let us hope that that is the case. If hon. Members study carefully one of the most important paragraphs in the judgment—paragraph 119—they will see, as we shall see in the headlines tomorrow, that although the Court was
	"struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature of the power of retention",
	that general statement was then highly qualified. I am sure that the lawyers in the Home Office will be looking with great care at the nature of those qualifications—and quite right, too.
	I want to deal briefly with the points raised by the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), and then with other key points. The hon. Gentleman made much sport about the Government's programme of constitutional renewal. This has been the most radical constitutionally reforming Government since the war; there is no question about that. This compares with the paucity of constitutional change—in fact, the absence of it—during previous Conservative Administrations. The Conservatives might complain about the Human Rights Act 1998, the Data Protection Act 1998, the Freedom of Information Act 2000, devolution, the establishment of the Mayor of London, and what we have done in respect of the House of Lords, but these are major constitutional changes that Vernon Bogdanor—a very independent-minded constitutional expert—has said will be seen as a quiet revolution in our constitutional arrangements.
	Moreover, although I accept that we have to do more, not least in terms of the time spent on the Floor of the House on Report, Parliament has been strengthened massively in the past 20 or 30 years, compared with the kind of Parliament that existed in the 1950s and 1960s. I shall refer—although I shall not read it out at length—to what Michael Ryle, a former Clerk of Committees of the House, said in 2005:
	"a simple factual comparison with the 1950s and early 1960s shows that Parliament—particularly the House of Commons—plays a more active, independent and influential role in Britain today than at any time for many years...the major advances in the past fifty years should not be derided."
	Parliament in the apparently golden age of the 1950s was supine; there were no rebellions of any kind at all. It was a supine, part-time Parliament, and that has now changed for the better.
	The constitutional reform Bill is specified in the Gracious Speech. Everyone knows that what has changed since then is the overriding imperative of dealing with the world economic downturn, but the Bill will require parliamentary time. The Queen's Speech states:
	"My Government will continue to take forward proposals on constitutional renewal, including strengthening the role of Parliament and other measures."
	As ever, Her Majesty meant what she said—and that is my intention, too.
	On the proposals in respect of a Bill of Rights and responsibilities, documents will be published. I accept that they have taken more time than I had hoped, but the hon. Gentleman can hardly complain that I have been silent on the issue, nor has the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon. Indeed, I know that the hon. Gentleman has paid me the compliment of reading very important—if I may say so—speeches that I made in October last year and in February and September this year, and I have paid him the compliment of reading his speeches too, which are interesting, if to some extent misconceived.

Jack Straw: I am afraid I cannot satisfy the hon. Gentleman on that. The proposals were never for secret inquests; they were for inquests without a jury. Only 2 per cent. of inquests in any event take place with a jury. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and I are considering the points that have been raised. Proposals will be brought forward in due course—in the Bill as presented to Parliament, I hope.
	The Political Parties and Elections Bill is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) drew to the attention of the House, a carried over Bill. It has already had its First and Second Reading, and its Public Bill Committee stage upstairs, and awaits its Report stage downstairs. There is a considerable amount of work to do before Report, not least in respect of the Electoral Commission, as we wish to take account of what was said on all sides on the issue of strengthening registration procedures, and also on issues relating to party funding. I repeat the commitments that I have given to the House, as has the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon, that we believe, and I have always believed, that such a matter should be proceeded with only with a consensus between the parties, if at all possible.
	I began these remarks by referring to the record of the Government on crime. We are the first Government since the war to have seen a reduction in crime both in terms of recorded crime and in terms of the British crime survey. Our determination, however, is to make the communities that all of us serve even safer. It is for those reasons that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and I have brought forward these measures. I commend the Queen's Speech, and the debate, to the House.
	 Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned. —(Helen Goodman.)
	 Debate to be resumed on Monday 8 December.

Maria Miller: I thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to hold this debate, and I am grateful to the Exchequer Secretary for coming along to respond to it.
	Naomi House was badly hit in the recent Icelandic banking crisis. The charity had a deposit of £5.7 million with Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander, which had its assets frozen two months ago. Naomi House is a children's hospice that supports hundreds of families with children who have illnesses that will shorten their lives—terminal illnesses. Those families come from throughout Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Dorset, West Sussex, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Surrey. To deliver its service, the hospice relies on trained doctors and nurses as well as on the efforts of more than 400 volunteers. Some 1,400 corporate organisations, many in my constituency, support the hospice, including the Automobile Association and Winterthur Life.
	Singer & Friedlander, an old, established British bank taken over by the Icelandic bank Kaupthing in 2006, was regulated by the Financial Services Authority. When the Government acted to freeze its assets, it was clear from the start that they did not intend charities, large or small, to suffer as a result. Indeed, in one Prime Minister's questions, the Leader of the House, who was standing in for the Prime Minister at the time, stated that there would be 100 per cent. protection for small charities and that the Government were
	"taking steps to protect larger charities by freezing the assets of the Icelandic banks and by lending £100 million while the unfreezing of those assets is sorted out."—[ Official Report, 15 October 2008; Vol. 480, c. 790.]
	That was an encouraging response, in which the Government articulated specific support. Indeed, on another occasion the Leader of the House, when questioned specifically on the plight of Naomi House, stated in the national media that direct support for charities would be in place, that the Government would do everything that they could to help charities and that they would not leave charities on their own. More recently, the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Kevin Brennan), made it clear that the commitment to helping charities through this crisis was still very much alive and well.
	The problem is that we are now two months on from when the assets were seized, and Naomi House has yet to see any of the promises bear fruit. It has seen confirmation that it is classified as a large charity under FSA rules, which means that it will be placed in a queue with other wholesale investors such as local authorities. In no way have the specific difficulties faced by charities been recognised, particularly in respect of securing borrowing to try to get them through this difficult time.
	At the creditors' meeting on Monday it was clear that recovering the money that has been lost will be an immensely long and drawn-out process, with no certainty about the outcome. Naomi House has also learned that the Office of the Third Sector will produce an action plan, but that is promised only for some time in the new year. Recent comments from the Minister with responsibility for the third sector at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations recession summit made it clear that the action plan will look more broadly at the economic downturn faced by charities, rather than at the banking crisis in particular. Frankly, despite specific approaches to the Prime Minister, the Department of Health and the Charity Commission, there has been radio silence from the Government about how they will keep their undertakings real and alive for Naomi House.
	The problem faced by Naomi House is that one third of its assets—£5.7 million—is frozen. For any organisation, that is a significant and overwhelming financial crisis. As a direct result of that, on 25 November Naomi House was forced to suspend its at-home service for terminally ill children in my constituency. The hospice-at-home outreach programme provided unique and much-needed support for families, and it was due to be rolled out into other areas of Hampshire, yet now the future of that service is bleak, and it has been suspended indefinitely. Two months may not be a long time for a Minister or Department, but it is a very long time for a charity that is almost completely reliant on its own financial resources. The trustees have been forced to take this action to safeguard other services. Without some clarity today, there may have to be further announcements.
	This matter cuts across other Departments. I know that the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, is well aware of the issues that face Naomi House, but his recent comments serve to illustrate the fact that a one-size-fits-all financial solution will not necessarily work in this case. I hope that the Exchequer Secretary can respond to that point. The hon. Gentleman suggested that the Department of Health, local authorities and primary care trusts could offer some way forward in terms of additional short-term funding, but the local situation in Hampshire for Naomi House means that it has no local authority contracts or PCT funding and receives only £300,000 from the Government through the Department of Health. In the context of a yearly turnover of £2.5 million, that is a tiny amount of money, but there is no indication from the Department that it is going to increase it in the near future, unless the Exchequer Secretary can advise me otherwise.
	The time has come for the Government to act decisively by clearly stating the support that Naomi House will receive. It is doing what it can to help itself. It helped to establish the Save our Savings group—a group of charities that are affected in the same way by the Icelandic financial crisis—and has secured a seat on the Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander administrator's creditors committee. However, the time has come for the Government to do their bit, too, and to show that they will follow through with some tangible support, as they promised when this crisis started.
	Going back to the promise made from the Front Bench by the Leader of the House on 15 October, what steps are being taken to protect larger charities, particularly given the protracted nature of the administrative process? The NCVO has been working hard to support the sector and pressing for a loan facility. What is the situation with regard to loans? Providing such support until charities are able to recover their own money may be just the sort of help that can stop any further cuts to important services such as those that Naomi House provides. The Leader of the House said that that money would be available, but we are still to hear any details.
	There are some specific differences in the Naomi House case that suggest that the Government's general approach may not provide the support that is intended. Will the Exchequer Secretary therefore undertake to look into the problems that it faces as a special case?
	The Government may want to consider, perhaps not now but in the medium term, whether the FSA rules on eligibility for compensation, which use the Companies Act 1985 to define what constitutes a small charity, are as robust as they need to be. Leaving Naomi House out in the cold cannot be anything other than an unintended consequence of how the current regulations are drafted.
	Will the Exchequer Secretary undertake to join her colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, who has offered to meet representatives from Naomi House to secure a cross-departmental solution to the problem?
	In conclusion, Naomi House works throughout seven counties, and in constituencies that are represented by Members of Parliament on both sides of the House. It provides a service that the NHS does not. It supports families of terminally ill children in a way that no other service does. A petition on the 10 Downing street website, calling for Government assistance, was set up by local campaigner Steve Brine and now has more than 4,000 signatures, which shows the strength of feeling in Hampshire and beyond about the plight of Naomi House.

Angela Eagle: I congratulate the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) on securing this important debate and I thank other hon. Members with a constituency interest who have contributed and rightly reflected their concern and that of their constituents about the circumstances in which Naomi House finds itself.
	As the hon. Lady said, the hospice does extraordinary work to provide respite care, terminal care and bereavement support for children and families from across the south of England. I know from my inquiries that hundreds of families are grateful for the dedication of the Naomi House staff and the support that they have received from the charity, often at the most traumatic times of their lives.
	The Government's current support for Naomi House is worth £330,000. As the hon. Lady pointed out, that is a small portion of the overall funding that the charity generates, and pays for only a small portion of the work that it undertakes. I have a similar institution, Clare House, in my area, albeit not in my constituency. Many right hon. and hon. Members in all parts of the House have had direct experience of the extremely valuable work that such organisations do. I hope that no one will be in any doubt about the widespread recognition of the value of the work that such institutions do. In recognition of the work that children's hospices do, the Government announced in February that the current grant for England's 40 children's hospices would be extended, with a further £20 million available between 2009 and 2011.
	As the hon. Lady pointed out, Naomi House is among those British charities that hold deposits in the Icelandic banks or their UK subsidiaries. This is an extremely uncertain time for those charities and for a wide range of other bodies that are in a similar position, be they companies, educational establishments, local authorities or other not-for-profit organisations. The majority of the charities affected hold deposits in Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander—or KSF—which is a UK-based subsidiary of Iceland's Kaupthing bank. As with much else in the current financial turbulence, the situation regarding the Icelandic banks in the UK is complicated, so it is worth reminding ourselves how we got into these circumstances.
	In July, the International Monetary Fund's mission to Iceland concluded that the Icelandic banking sector faced significant risks. On 29 September, the Icelandic Government acquired a 75 per cent. stake in Glitnir, nationalising Iceland's third largest bank. Amid the turbulence in global financial markets, two other Icelandic banks—Landsbanki and Kaupthing—found themselves in increasing financial difficulties. On 7 and 8 October, the Financial Services Authority, the UK's financial regulator, determined that the funds held by the UK operations of those two banks—Heritable and KSF—no longer met the levels of funding required by law. The banks had put themselves in an unsustainable position. Their holdings had sunk to such a level that it would have been dangerous for them to continue accepting money from depositors. To protect retail depositors, the Treasury, using powers under the Banking (Special Provisions) Act 2008, transferred retail deposits from KSF's Edge deposit business and from Heritable to ING Direct. The remainder of the business entered into administration, with the remaining eligible retail depositors also being guaranteed.
	The Government have announced that we will guarantee all UK-based retail depositors in Icelandic banks. That guarantee ensures that individual UK savers will receive protection in full. Of course, those charities that are eligible claimants will receive protection under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, but there are no special rules under the scheme for charities, whose eligibility is determined in the same way as for all other depositors. The FSA is responsible for making the rules governing eligibility for compensation under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. The rules are based on organisational form rather than organisational purpose. "Charity" is a status that can apply to a number of forms, because charities and other third sector bodies can be—and are—organised in different ways.
	The guiding principle behind much of the financial regulation is that the system is intended to offer protection to ordinary investors, savers and users of financial services—in other words, people who have limited resources, who are less likely to have access to the expertise to protect themselves and who might not be in a position to reduce the risks that they face by, say, diversification. In practice, that translates into making private individuals and small organisations of all kinds—that is, retail depositors—eligible as claimants under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, as well as treating all larger organisations as wholesale depositors and therefore ineligible for the compensation scheme.
	The hon. Lady rightly pointed out that Naomi House is not defined as a small depositor or a retail depositor, but as a wholesale depositor.
	Many small charities will be guaranteed under the scheme, but Naomi House and other larger charities will not qualify. Like a number of other charities, companies, educational establishments, local authorities and other bodies, Naomi House is classified as a wholesale depositor and, as such, will have to await the outcome of the administration procedures.
	The Government's decision to intervene to ensure that retail depositors receive their money in full was based on the need to ensure financial stability and to protect the taxpayer. Compared with small retail depositors, wholesale depositors have a greater ability to assess and mitigate financial risk, including through diversification of their savings or investment portfolios. Charities that are not eligible for compensation from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme will be treated in accordance with the usual administration procedures.
	Details of the timetable and the process for the administration of KSF are a matter for the administrators, Ernst and Young, and I would suggest that those charities seeking further information contact the administrators direct. I was pleased to learn—the hon. Lady mentioned this in her speech—that Naomi House has played a central role in the creation of a new charity action group, formed to represent charities that have deposits at risk with KSF. More than 25 charities are members of the group, which is campaigning to secure the return of the funds invested with the bank. I am also pleased to report to the House—again, the hon. Lady mentioned this—that a representative from the group speaking for Naomi House and other charities has secured a place on the creditors committee of KSF, which met the administrators for the first time on Monday. That representation on the creditors committee will give charities a stronger voice during the administration process. The third sector is independent and, as such, it is not the Government's role to provide charities and other not-for-profit organisations with financial advice.

Angela Eagle: It is the case that processes of administration have to be gone through and the creditors have a particular queue to go through in law. There is no option but to go through the process. I recognise that it leads to some uncertainty, and it is too early in the process to tell whether all the money will be forthcoming in the end. That is the nature of administration procedures of this kind, as the hon. Gentleman knows.

Angela Eagle: The hon. Lady has made her point, but this is not propping up a bank. The £100 million was given to Landsbanki to secure the orderly wind-down of a bank whose assets had been frozen. The assets were frozen to prevent them from being taken out of the country in a drastic and rapidly developing situation. The £100 million that was lent does not prop up the bank. As I said earlier, it helps to secure an orderly wind-down of a bank that is not relevant to Naomi House's issue, because it is Landsbanki, not KSF.
	First, this is a loan; it is not a grant. Secondly, it will be recovered in full at a commercial rate of interest as part of the wind-down of Landsbanki, so I would not like the hon. Lady to go away with the idea that, somehow, there is a pot of £100 million that could have been used, or is intended to be used, to give some protection to wholesale depositors. The Government decided to protect retail depositors. Wholesale depositors, whatever their form, go into the queue through the administration process to try to recover the money that they have on deposit. That includes all the authorities, public or otherwise, and companies and investors that do not qualify as retail investors. That is the situation as it is at the moment. Let me assure this House that the Government take very seriously the problems faced by charities with regard to their deposits in Icelandic banks and their UK subsidiaries.
	Lord Myners and the Minister with responsibility for the third sector, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Kevin Brennan), have met over the past two months with representatives of the charity sector to gain a clearer understanding of the challenges they face.
	 Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 9(3))
	 Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.— (Mr Spellar.)

Angela Eagle: That was rather an uncharitable intervention, because I have done my best this evening to set out some of the difficulties that there are with respect to the difference between retail and wholesale depositors, and what the implications of those are. I do not believe that this Government are leaving the charitable sector on its own. Its representatives have met two different Ministers, we are in contact with developments and we have met the range of organisations that I listed to deal with the ongoing situation. The point at issue is whether wholesale depositors can be converted into something else and helped in part, because it is not possible to guarantee all wholesale depositors—indeed, many Members of this House would not regard that as a remotely acceptable development, if it were to occur.
	We face difficulties, but I would like to emphasise again that this Government have not left charities on their own. We are working with them to see what we can do to assist them as this process goes on. We will continue to do that, and I hope that the hon. Lady will be assured by my suggestion that that is so.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 House adjourned .